Picking a team from bars to beam and hoping for 10s: Fantasy leagues in gymnastics are a thing

WASHINGTON (AP) - Thomas Bateman kept busy this year managing college fantasy teams in 12 different leagues, a lineup that included SECret Weapon and One and Dunne. Five of them won it all.

These were not teams stocked with NFL or NBA players. All 12 were made up of college gymnasts, and the Chicago-based marriage and family therapist is just one member of a fervent and growing fan base that channels their love of the sport into fantasy leagues.

"It's such a great way to get to know the sport a bit," Bateman said. "When I started off, I got these lists from College Gym News and picked athletes I didn't really know, so then I got to know teams I liked and then got familiar with athletes I want to draft. It's a great way to potentially grow the audience of the sport."

Interest in gymnastics traditionally peaks with the Olympic cycle, but on the "gymternet" - the online global community for devoted fans - it's a year-round sport. At the college level, major growth in name, image and likeness deals, viewership and streaming availability has been accompanied by a surge in fantasy leagues, too.

This year, over 7,000 women's college gymnastics devotees have found their way to the Gymlytics and GymCastic fantasy platforms - all within the last few years.

Gymlytics, which launched before the 2022 collegiate season, runs through the regular season and has a postseason bracket competition. GymCastic, in its second year, offers weekly fantasy matchups, including the NCAA postseason and elite meets later in the year.

The two leagues take slightly different approaches. Gymlytics participants draft individual athletes for their team at the beginning of the season and set lineups for each week of competition. GymCastic runs a salary cap-style draft, in which athletes are valued at a certain number of "gym rubles." Participants select athletes until their roster is filled while staying under the cap.

Neither are the first platforms of their kind: Founders of both pointed to Kristen Watkins, a former college gymnast and self-taught programmer who created and ran College Fantasy Gymnastics for the decade leading into the pandemic-canceled 2020 season, as an inspiration.

Watkins competed for the MIT gymnastics team until it was cut following the 2009 season, a period in which other college gymnastics programs were cut or coming under threat of reduction. The creation of the fantasy league, she said, was motivated in part because she wanted to see if there could be more interest in women's gymnastics.

Subsequent leagues have hinged on the same idea.

"That's the point of everything we do: It's very, very specific to the gymnastics fans," said Jessica O'Beirne, creator of the popular GymCastic podcast and a co-founder of the fantasy league of the same name. "We use the lingo of gymnastics. It's so niche and so specific.″

The Gymlytics audience is similarly a lot of "diehard gymnastics fans," said Lauren Pickens, a co-creator. That includes former athletes. Pickens recalled hearing from recently graduated members of the championship-winning Michigan team who had barely missed the Gymlytics draft deadline but wanted to put teams together. (She helped them join in.)

Like all fantasy team managers who care about results, Bateman and other participants have their hands full. Week to week, participants set lineups across the four apparatuses - vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise - to maximize the total number of points their team scores. An injury or struggles at a weekend meet are factors in roster changes.

Bateman joined Gymlytics in 2022 with friends who had been gymnasts at the University of Michigan. He named SECret Weapon after the Southeastern Conference, whose member school LSU is a repeat favorite at this week’s NCAA championships in Texas. One and Dunne bears the surname of LSU gymnast and popular influencer Olivia Dunne - and the name worked in a league where each team could include just one athlete from each college.

As GymCastic and Gymlytics have taken off, their creators have seen these diehard fans bring in friends and family who are less familiar with the sport.

″We've gotten a lot of emails from people saying, my significant other did fantasy basketball or fantasy football and because there's a fantasy gymnastics, they wanted to connect with me and my passion so they joined a league," said GymCastic COO Steve Cooper. "And now they're screaming at the TV like I am."

According to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association, the number of Americans over the age of 21 participating in fantasy sports grew by about 5% between 2017 and 2022. It’s been much more robust for Gymlytics, which launched its first season with 1,000 teams and, according to co-founder Yarden Tamir, had nearly 7,000 teams across 55 countries this season; and for GymCastic, which has seen over 10% growth between its first and second seasons, per Cooper.

While overall fantasy sports participation skews male by about a 2:1 ratio, according to FSGA data, the Gymlytics and GymCastic founders both estimated their participants were more gender balanced.

Multiple fantasy gymnastics participants and founders pointed to the 2021 and 2022 collegiate seasons as a turning point. Those seasons followed the delayed Tokyo Games and a 2021 Supreme Court decision allowing college athletes to earn endorsement money, marking the beginning of Olympics gymnasts being able to cash in and retain their NCAA eligibility.

Other than Simone Biles, every member of that medal-winning Tokyo team, including alternates, went on to compete in the NCAA.

"Olympics is so fun but it's hard to consistently follow elite athletes because oftentimes they're only competing three or four times per year," Bateman said. NCAA gymnastics “is fun, too, and it's such an accessible format."

Accessibility has also grown as streaming networks have jumped in. According to ESPN, the three most-watched gymnastics telecasts have been the three most recent national championships. In 2022, ESPN and affiliated platforms broadcast 40 meets across five platforms; after championships this year, it will be more than 60 meets across eight.

"FOX bought in this year. ESPN is doing GameDay-style shows to lead into their broadcast," said Brandis Heffner, the managing editor of College Gym News and a fantasy player. "Giving that option to gymnastics fans has been a fantastic way to help build the sport."

Running a custom fantasy league isn't without its challenges. League officials pointed to challenges with data availability and inconsistent information across conferences and regions, including judging details.

Gymlytics and GymCastic have both gotten around it by leveraging the devotion among their participants, essentially crowdsourcing scores to get them into their databases. While there are improvements to be made on both the institutional and platform sides, the fantasy league founders all expressed optimism.

"There are a ton of little features we want to add and make the environment easier to use, more automated," Tamir said. “If one actual person you don't know uses it, that's a huge win, but when thousands of users are using it on a daily basis, that's wild. We're just continuing to make that tent larger."