Sho Nakamori is a hard-working, cerebral member of the men's gymnastics community. Not only is he an eight time All-American and member of the U.S. Senior National Team, he is also a CGA National Academic All-American. Nakamori just completed his undergraduate career by earning degrees in International Relations and Japanese Studies. His recent tweet on Twitter said it all - "snakamori done with school. now, focus=gymnastics."
Now that his studying days are over, for the time being at least, Nakamori is focused like a laser beam to earn [...more]
As expected, Chuck Chmelka has replaced Francis Allen as Nebraska's men's gymnastics head coach. Allen announced his resignation last week after forty years on the job. Chmelka has been coaching at Nebraska since 1982, after competing there from 1978-1981.
Current assistant coach, Jim Hartung, will remain on staff as assistant coach. Chmelka and Hartung know what it's like to win a national championship as they won three titles when they competed together in '79, '80 and '81. Hartung went on to enjoy one more title in 1982, and is a two-time Olympian.
Apparently Chmelka and Hartung will be under the gun [...more]
Legendary Nebraska Head Gymnastics Coach Francis Allen announced his retirement effective July 1. Allen has had an amazing career which spans forty years, in which his teams won eight national championships. Hired at the age of 26, he is still a very young man. Among the highlights of his career was coaching Nebraska gymnast Trent Dimas to a gold medal on high bar at the '92 Barcelona Olympics, which were the games where Vitaly Scherbo won an unprecedented six gold medals.
Allen had the pleasure of rubbing elbows with such luminary football coaches as [...more]
Stanford All-American gymnast, Sho Nakamori, has launched a new blog that will chronicle his quest to make the 2012 U.S. Olympic Team. The blog, while new, is jam-packed with interesting information about Nakamori's life, interests, and hopes.
His about page is a very interesting bio including his fond memories of [...more]
The Arizona State Men's Gymnastics Team, coached by Scott Barclay, is an excellent example of a successful program that continues to excel despite being kicked in the teeth back in 1993. Prior to that, the ASU program succeeded for 25 years as a fully-funded Division I entity under Coach Don Robinson. Thanks to Title IX, the program was unfairly axed, but was soon resurrected as an unfunded club team, and has been coached by Barclay ever since.
Sun Devil Gymnastics was forced to organize as a non-profit 501-C3 booster club consisting of 7-9 board members. Fundraising consists of booster club memberships and donations, corporate sponsorships and team fundraising events. One such event was the recent [...more]
Gymnastics Coaching alerted us to the announcement that Illinois A.D., Ron Guenther, has promoted Women's Gymnastics Head Coach Bob Starkell to Director of Gymnastics. He will remain the women's head coach, and Justin Spring has been promoted to Associate Head Coach, assuming all head coaching duties. Visiting Assistant Coach Ivan Ivankov will become the new full-time Assistant Coach. Starkell will handle the [...more]
With the pressure of the team competition out of the way, Saturday night's event finals enabled the gymnasts to let it rip. They were competing on their best events and the prizes were for national championship and/or All-American status. The evening's spotlight shone on Oklahoma's Steven Legendre and Ilinois' Paul Ruggeri as they each brought home two national titles in impressive and exciting fashion.
The floor competition was very tight, but Legendre was able to successfully defend his [...more]
Stanford handily put away the competition to win their fourth NCAA Men's Gymnastics title. The Cardinal closed the deal with the evening's top scores on rings. Tim Gentry and Nick Noone led the way with scores of 15.45, followed by Kyle Oi's 15.35 and Sho Nakamori's 15.05. Michigan and Oklahoma mounted late charges on floor and vault but fell short.
Oklahoma's bid to repeat was officially thwarted with their [...more]
The Super Six for the 2009 NCAA Championships advanced as predicted. The evening competition was exciting, with Oklahoma prevailing over Illinois and Ohio State. The most amazing performance of the night was by Illinois' Daniel Ribeiro, who scored an outstanding 16.00 on pommel horse. That's easily the NCAA's top pommel score of the season. We'll be scouring youtube to find that video!
The Sooners really piled it on with their typically great performances [...more]
The 2009 NCAA Men's Gymnastics Championships will take place April 16-18, and will be hosted by the University of Minnesota. Click here to view the live results as they occur. There will be two team qualifying sessions on April 16, with the top six teams advancing to the team and All-Around Finals on April 17. The individual event finals will take place on April 18. Here are the most current team and individual rankings as published by GymInfo: [...more]
