as if filled with cheers The air at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas, one corner of the floor was eerily quiet.
Several minutes — and what felt like much, much longer — passed after UCLA’s Emma Malabuyo landed her beam, the final routine for the Bruins. Almost everyone’s eyes in the field were fixed on the scoreboard.
But the gymnasts on the LSU team already knew what the outcome would be. They stood almost silently near the safe, tears streaming down their faces, embracing each other.
When Malabuyo’s 9.975 finally appeared it was official. The Tigers, the No. 1 seed and defending national champions, were going home. UCLA and Utah advanced to the NCAA Championship finals.
“It was really overwhelming and crushing at the time,” LSU associate head coach Courtney McCool Griffith told ESPN in November. “And he lives with you.”
Ultimately, the team managed to find perspective and, according to McCullum Griffeth, take the emotion out of it. Now, all these months after that day in April, the Tigers have been able to learn from the experience — and the sting of disappointment has made them even better this season.
“The past is in the past, but I think it’s important to reflect on the bad moments that happened to us and try to learn from those moments because it’s important,” junior Connor McClain told ESPN before the season. “You don’t want to repeat what happened. … But I think we’re all using it as motivation, even the freshmen and our transfers. … It’s like, ‘Okay, how can we be even better this time?'”
mclean and he The teammates wasted no time in getting ready for 2026.
The Tigers returned to the gym in June, nearly seven months before their opening meeting in the star-studded Sprouts Farmers Market Collegiate Quad on Saturday against three of last season’s top four teams – Oklahoma, UCLA and Utah (4 p.m. ET, ABC).
While being back in the practice gym was a familiar comfort for McClain, the LSU team has a new look overall. Six gymnasts graduated at the end of last season – including individual NCAA champions Haley Bryant and Aleah Finnegan and fan favorite Olivia Dunn. There were a lot of new faces to get to know, and when McClain arrived at the team’s first informal summer practice she didn’t know what to expect at first.
“The energy was 100% different,” McClain said. “This team is very young, but very fun. From the moment you walk in, everyone is just telling jokes, and it’s like the whole practice. … When you’re having fun, it makes everything easier.”
Since those early sessions, the team has continued togetherness both in and out of the gym. They took a weekend retreat at the beginning of the fall semester in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and hosted make-your-own dip nights and pumpkin-carving parties. McClain said as the season rapidly approaches, the atmosphere in the gym continues to be excited and even downright silly at times.
And the team should once again challenge everyone in the country. McClain said she has made a full recovery after suffering an Achilles injury last year and expects to compete in all four events this season. She claimed the SEC beam title in her freshman year and had three perfect 10 scores (twice on beam, once on floor).
Sophomore Kailyn Chio was SEC Freshman of the Year in 2025 after an incredible debut season and won the NCAA vault title. And junior Amari Drayton, another former elite gymnast, has been a major contributor on vault and floor. Sophomores and fellow former national team gymnasts Kalia Lincoln and Lexi Zeiss are expected to contribute to many of the lineup, and the team has high expectations for freshmen Nina Ballou, who won four floor national titles at the club level, and Haley Mustari, who won four national bars titles at the club level.
Chiyo said the team’s closeness has been a big part of their preseason focus — and everyone has made an effort to get to know each other personally. Chio was mentored by Bryant, now an assistant coach on the team, during her first season and is already trying to return the favor to a new group of new players.
“I went through a lot during my freshman year, especially being away from home, so I know what it’s like,” Chiyo told ESPN. “I just try to tell them all, ‘This should be fun. I know it’s really hard, but just try to enjoy every moment because it goes by fast.'”
Such relationships have been vital to the team’s success in recent years. After being a consistent contender for several seasons, the Tigers won their first NCAA Championship title in 2024. This was certainly an incredible accomplishment, and the team and its fans celebrated it with a victory parade in Baton Rouge. But for the people associated with the program it was normal business.
In fact, in an interview with ESPN last year, head coach Jay Clark said he planned to do “nothing different” ahead of the 2025 season.
“The only thing that changes are the things that change from year to year, because you have personalities and qualities and gymnastics that go away, and then you have personalities and qualities and gymnastics that come in, and you have to figure out how you fill those voids, whether it’s personality qualities or leadership qualities,” Clark said. “You have to let each team develop its own personality, but the destination is always the same.”
That’s all true, but the team has made a slight change this fall. They have used “accountability partners” for the past several seasons, pairing teammates with each other to help each other throughout the season, and this year the idea has been supercharged into “Tiger Teammates.” According to McCool Griffith, team members are assigned a different partner each month and are tasked with getting to know each other and encouraging each other as much as possible during that time. They also created “Motivation Monday”, in which the team picks a different word for the week and comes up with something they can do together to emphasize the word.
Although the idea is new, Monday has always been the most important day of the week for the team. During the season, no matter what happened over the weekend – whether it was a big win or a challenging loss – everyone gathers in the meeting room to reflect on the past week and set the tone for the week ahead. A pyramid has been placed on the wall as a reminder of what the team decided at the beginning of the season to be its core values. This year, the words, “with each other, for each other” sit at the bottom as the foundation for everything else.
“We do it every week,” McCollum Griffeth told ESPN. “There are a lot of important things that we can see visually, hear and talk about, and the sustainability of this is something we are very confident about.”
And it’s not just about reiterating who scored what in which event, or often about the score itself. It’s usually the little things that carry the most weight.
“We shout and listen to things in the living room [the coaches] Don’t look,” McCullum Griffeth said.[The gymnasts] They’ll often share what their teammates have done, and what they’ve appreciated, and all the ways they’ve gone out of their way for each other. We try to emphasize that everyone has the ability to impact in multiple ways, and really acknowledge what everyone brings to the team.”
Everyone on the team was heavily recruited and extremely successful before coming to Baton Rouge – but this season the team has 21 members and with only six competing in each event, not everyone will get a chance to compete every week. And for some, they may rarely crack an event lineup during their four years. Even Dunn, a former junior national team member and possibly the most famous collegiate gymnast in recent memory, only consistently lined up one or two events during her career. (An injury sidelined most of his fifth year in 2025.) Accepting a different role can be a challenge for young gymnasts accustomed to being stars at their clubs.
Even for guys like McClain and Chio, who make immediate impacts in their first seasons, adjusting to being part of a team after years of primarily competing as individuals can feel like a culture shock. McClain said she was not completely comfortable with the all-for-the-team approach by the end of last season. Ironically, an Achilles injury helped her in this regard as she had to find herself a different venue when she was not able to practice for several months and then it was sealed after the debacle in Fort Worth. As he said, the switch was flipped.
“In the summer, when the season didn’t go the way I wanted it to, I said, ‘Okay, this is my time,'” McClain said. “At the end of the day I’m going to give everything I have to this team, no matter what kind of year I have. I just want to do what’s best for the team.”
In addition to likely being one of the team’s most consistent and important gymnasts this year, McClain has taken on a leadership role and hopes her own personal growth will help some underclassmen reach that milestone sooner than her.
For McCollum Griffeth, Clark and the rest of the coaching staff, being a talented gymnast is just one part of the equation when it comes to one’s value to the team, and sometimes in conversations about the team and its priorities, it seems almost secondary. Because for the Tigers, being part of the team – and completely buying into that idea – is most important.
And while McCullum Griffeth will tell you the coaching staff focuses most of all on process-based goals, and improving week to week throughout the season, the emphasis on the team and what it means to be a part of it — no matter who’s role — might be the extra edge that moves the Tigers past the 2025 loss and back to where they feel they are in the spring.
“Our goal is to win the national championship,” Chiyo said. “It’s LSU, I guess it’s just kind of a given. And I want everyone to stay as close and bonded as possible. These are my sisters, and we’re going to have fun, and just keep grinding every moment until we get to the top together.”
