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Tony Gutierrez

FORT WORTH — For a brief spell Thursday night, the LSU women’s gymnastics team wasn’t performing like a title contender. Coach Jay Clark had tried to avoid overhyping the NCAA semifinal, but as a result, his team came out emotionally flat, he said, with the first few gymnasts stepping or hopping on their vault landings en route to good-but-not-great scores.

Clark told them, “Guys, we don’t have to be perfect today, but we can’t sleepwalk through it, either.”

By the time LSU rotated to beam and then floor, the Tigers were fully awake. In those final two rotations of Thursday’s semifinal, LSU scored a 9.9 or higher on 10 of 12 routines — a success rate that would put the team firmly in the mix for the championship.

The Tigers stayed composed during beam, secured their landings and soared with highflying tumbling. By the end of the session, the chants of LSU fans filled Dickies Arena. This is a program that demands the spotlight — here and everywhere else.

LSU, the nation’s second-ranked team, is filled with star power and has impressed all season, winning the SEC championship and breaking the school record for team score. Away from the competitive floor, LSU’s gymnasts have even more: fame, fortunes and followings that extend far beyond gymnastics obsessives.

That’s in large part because of senior Olivia Dunne, the elite gymnast turned influencer whose online clout — 8 million followers on TikTok and 5 million on Instagram — makes her one of the most popular gymnasts on the planet.

Some of her teammates have big followings, too, perhaps by association with Dunne or by following her lead. The result: millions of dollars in endorsement deals for the LSU gymnasts, who have capitalized on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/02/21/what-is-a-nil-deal/?itid=ap_jessedougherty" target=_blank>the NCAA’s new rules</a> that allow athletes to make money off their names.

As a team, LSU lives in the limelight and consistently produces. The Tigers led the nation in attendance, averaging more than 12,500 per event. Clark is known as an ace recruiter, and once those top athletes arrive, they train in a <a href="https://www.lsugym.com/gymnastics-training-facility" target="_blank">facility</a> that’s considered one of the nation’s best.

LSU gymnastics, in other words, seemingly has it all except a national title.

To win their first, the Tigers must outscore Utah, Florida and California in Saturday’s final. The Tigers had the best score in the semifinals, 198.1125, even with that ho-hum vault rotation. But all four advancing teams earned scores separated by less than a half-point. The top-ranked Oklahoma Sooners had looked unstoppable this season, but they stumbled in the semifinal and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/04/19/oklahoma-gymnastics-ncaa-semifinals-collapse/" target=_blank>failed to advance</a>.

The Tigers began to seriously contend about a decade ago. Since 2016, LSU has finished as the national runner-up three times and in fourth place twice. Clark, the head coach, previously worked at LSU as an assistant under legendary coach D-D Breaux, and before the team traveled to Fort Worth, he said he still embraces one of Breaux’s sayings: “You hang around the goal long enough, you’ll score.”

“I believe — whether it’s this year or next or the next or the next — that LSU is going to win a national championship,” Clark said. “We have to stick to the formula that’s working for us and not make it about a particular, specific result. Otherwise, you feel like you’re chasing your tail all the time.”

LSU’s veteran roster, with four seniors and seven graduate students, is headlined by senior Haleigh Bryant, who scored a 9.9 or higher on each apparatus en route to the individual all-around title. But seven gymnasts hit that mark at least once in the semifinal, a sign of LSU’s depth.

LSU lists 22 gymnasts on its roster; the other teams in the final have between 14 and 17. Programs can have only 12 gymnasts on an athletic scholarship, but walking on becomes more attractive if that school has a record of athletes earning significant money through endorsement deals.

Since July 2021, when the NCAA began allowing athletes to profit off their names, images and likenesses (NIL), LSU gymnasts have disclosed 75 deals worth a combined $4.9 million, according to data obtained by The Washington Post through an open-records request. That’s nearly as much as the football team ($5.6 million) and the high-profile women’s basketball team ($5 million) — and far more than the men’s basketball team ($1.3 million) and all other LSU programs.

LSU did not release the value of deals disclosed per athlete, so it isn’t clear how much of the gymnastics team’s $4.9 million has gone to Dunne, who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/sports/ncaabasketball/olivia-dunne-haley-jones-endorsements.html" target=_blank>told the New York Times</a> in 2022 that she made “seven figures” while declining to provide a specific amount. (Dunne wasn’t in any of LSU’s lineups in the semifinal, but she competed on floor eight times and bars twice this season.)

“When NIL started, I was one of the ones going, ‘Oh man, this is going to destroy all the stuff that we talk about and want in terms of our culture,’ ” Clark said. “Liv’s sort of the poster child for [NIL], but she has done a tremendous job of setting the tone of being a good teammate.”

An athlete’s earning potential is often correlated with the size of her social media following, which suggests many LSU gymnasts, not only Dunne, benefit from lucrative deals.

Elena Arenas, a close friend of Dunne who didn’t compete this season, has nearly half a million followers on Instagram and TikTok combined. Some key contributors for the Tigers have close to 100,000 followers or more. Most of the gymnasts here who have similarly large followings were top elite gymnasts before college. Several LSU gymnasts are outliers because they <i>didn’t</i> compete on the world stage yet built these individual brands that together increase the spotlight on the program.

At LSU, each sport has its own “creative pod” that focuses on social media, photos and videos — resources atypical for Olympic sports. The gymnastics pod meets with Clark regularly, and Cody Worsham, the athletic department’s chief brand officer, said the coach has been exceptionally willing to provide access to his program, including for a documentary series that began last season. When the school explained the launch of a subscription video service at LSU, Worsham said Clark initially was skeptical about the strategy.

According to Worsham, the coach asked: “How does this help recruiting? If it’s all behind a paywall, how do I get to show it to recruits?”

Ultimately, last season’s documentary series “went super viral” and generated revenue, Worsham said. Once Clark saw the quality of the work, he understood the value. And the video team created shorter clips for social media, which satisfied Clark’s recruiting itch.

“As a recruiter, you have to listen to your recruits,” Worsham said. “You have to anticipate where they are going and what their needs and trends are, and [Clark] foresaw this pre-NIL — that content, branding, social media was so important to the athletes.”

It’s all in place at LSU — everything needed to grab attention, build top-tier teams and contend for national titles. For years, the breakthrough has seemed imminent, and now the Tigers are almost there, one strong competition away from celebrating the peak this program has never reached.

<i>Albert Samaha contributed to this report.</i>

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