The Ohio State College Athletics Division, a division that introduced in over $251 million in income final 12 months, greater than some other within the nation, has dropped scholarships from its males’s gymnastics crew, in keeping with a neighborhood NBC affiliate citing “a number of sources”.
Ohio State is one in all solely 15 males’s NCAA males’s gymnastics applications left, a lower from virtually 60 within the Eighties.
That is being handled throughout the gymnastics world, together with Olympic pommel horse icon Stephen Nedoroscik, because the tip-of-the-spear for the brand new world of collegiate athletics,
Ohio State eradicating athletic scholarships from Males’s Gymnastics. But once more, one other step backwards for MGYM. With the success of present and former NCAA gymnasts on the Olympics you’d suppose NCAA applications could be excited for the upcoming season, not stripping away alternatives. https://t.co/gs38K7Kode
— Stephen Nedoroscik (@GymnastSteve) October 4, 2024
The transfer echoes feedback in August by Ohio State’s new athletics director Ross Bjork that rosters could be lower and a few sports activities would ‘act somewhat bit extra like a membership sport’ as a part of a brand new tiered athletics division for the Buckeyes. The transfer additionally, up to now, holds true to Bjork’s remark that the varsity intends to keep up all 36 of its varsity athletics applications.
Whereas there are untested long-term plans in place to stabilize school athletics within the new world of pay-to-play, together with bringing in non-public fairness and increasingly-louder rumblings of spinning off revenue making soccer and basketball applications, there might be numerous right-sizing of rosters and bills within the subsequent few seasons, if not complete elimination of applications, on the street to options, and people budgets and roster spots are unlikely to be returned down the street.
Ohio State hosted the 2024 NCAA Championship in males’s gymnastics on the on-campus, 3,700 seat Covelli Heart, the place the Buckeyes completed sixth behind Stanford, Michigan, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Illinois. Ohio State has received three nationwide titles, fifteen Huge Ten titles, and 5 Nissen Award winners because the NCAA’s greatest male gymnast.
Whereas curiosity in girls’s school gymnastics has exploded throughout the nation, with crowds of 10,000-plus turning into a daily prevalence throughout the nation (and two applications averaging greater than 10,000 followers per recreation final season), males’s NCAA gymnastics nonetheless averages simply 673 spectators, with the most effective program pulling in about 1,200 followers per day in keeping with The Faculty Gymnastics Affiliation.
NCAA males’s gymnastics applications are restricted to a most of 6.3 scholarships, and like swimming these scholarships may be break up amongst any variety of athletes.
The U.S. males’s gymnastics crew received a historic bronze medal on the Paris 2024 Olympic Video games within the crew competitors: their first medal since taking bronze in 2008. The boys’s nationwide gymnastics crew members come from quite a lot of totally different faculties, notably Stanford, Michigan, and Oklahoma, however noe attended or are scheduled to attend Ohio State.
