Friday, April 18 and Saturday, April 19, William and Mary men’s gymnastics will compete in the team portion of the National Collegiate Athletic Association Men’s Gymnastics Championships for the first time since 2021. The Tribe clinched its NCAA bid after finishing in fifth place at the Eastern College Athletic Conference championships April 5.
“There are two ways [into the NCAAs],” William and Mary Director of Gymnastics Mike Powell said. “One is winning the conference championship. Unfortunately, that was not us this year. The other is a scoring average, but the average score must include the conference championship. So it was up in the air until conference, so that is where we clinched it, but we really clinched it based on the strength of our regular season.”
According to the NCAA, the scoring average is calculated by taking a team’s top six single-meet scores, dropping the highest one and averaging the remaining five. William and Mary’s average after the ECAC meet was 309.875, a mark that put the Tribe slightly ahead of No. 13 Greenville University and secured it the final spot in the 12-team NCAA field.
Although the Tribe has sent individual athletes to the NCAA Championships in each of the last three seasons, it has been four years since the Green and Gold took part in the event’s team competition. For Powell, William and Mary’s return to the sport’s biggest stage can be attributed to the depth and experience of the Tribe’s roster.
“A lot of it is depth,” Powell said. “After our 2021 season, we graduated eight of our athletes, which was a huge class for us, and then the entire size of our team was down as low as 14. We gradually built that back up over time, and we’re at 19 this year, for example. That just gives us a lot more depth to play with and some older, more experienced athletes that have grown up over those last few years and developed.”
The Tribe is now at the point in its rebuild where it possesses a number of athletes comfortable with the rigors of Division I competition, a quality Powell listed as invaluable.
“You recruit in great athletes, which is great, but usually, they develop over time,” Powell said. “If not in gymnastics, then in learning how to compete, and maturity, and confidence and experience. And so just having more guys on the team that are a few years farther along in their development is a huge asset.”
The Tribe will begin the tournament Friday, taking part in a qualifying session hosted by Michigan at Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor, Mich. The Green and Gold will compete alongside No. 1 Oklahoma, No. 4 Nebraska, No. 5 Penn State, No. 8 Air Force and No. 9 California. According to the NCAA, the qualifier’s top three teams, top three all-around competitors and “top three individuals on each event not already qualified on a team or as an all-around competitor” will advance to the finals on Saturday.
Although William and Mary will compete to the best of its ability in the qualifier’s team championship, Powell explained the Tribe will primarily focus on getting individual athletes into the finals.
“I think some teams — especially teams who are in the top five or so nationally — are going to be trying to position themselves as best as possible for day two, right, to have a strong team performance in the finals and try to get that podium finish,” Powell said. “You’ll have some mid-tier teams that are going all out on day one to try to secure their spot for their team into the finals. And then you’ll have teams like us, where we’re certainly trying to push as far as we can with the team championship and put up the best team performance we can, but we’re also going to be making some strategic moves to position individuals to get into finals and see if we can come home with some All-Americans.”
The Tribe’s fortunes could be decided by how precisely its athletes execute the smallest details in their routines, according to Powell.
“We’re going to be trying to push a number of athletes through into the finals, and you never know,” Powell said. “Part of what’s fun about NCAA Championships is everybody’s so good and the margins are so small. It comes down to what happens on that day. So we have guys who have the potential to be an NCAA All-American, and it just depends on whether you take that one step or whether you stick the landing.”
Powell identified sophomore Evan Wilkins on floor, junior Ricky Pizem on high bar, freshman Luke Tully on high bar, sophomore Niko Greenly on rings and parallel bars, graduate student Sam Lee on vaults and parallel bars, junior Mark Fu on rings and freshman Connor Barrow on vault as athletes with the potential to be named All-Americans.
Greenly and Lee, the Tribe’s sole second-day representatives in 2024, seek to return to the tournament finals for the second consecutive season, while Tully and Barrow hope to continue their strong debut campaigns. The former earned the ECAC’s Rookie of the Year award, while the latter won the vault national title at the USA Gymnastics Collegiate Championship.
Any William and Mary athlete to receive an NCAA All-American distinction would become the first Tribe gymnast to do so since Andrew Lyubovsky ’21 on parallel bars in 2021.
