It looks like Francis Allen, the long time head coach at the University of Nebraska is retiring.  I just wanted to mention this because Francis has been a big part of my life as a gymnast. I might even consider him one of my “grandfathers” since I’ve known him ever since I started the sport.  Yay to Francis for doing so much for men’s gymnastics.

While all of this must be exciting for Francis (he gets to kick back and relax now), it looks like the gymnastics team at the University of Nebraska is faced with some trouble.  From what I hear, it seems as though the school is thinking about dropping its men’s gymnastics program.  I can’t begin to say how terrible this would be for collegiate gymnastics.  After all, there’s only 18 universities left that supports men’s gymnastics.  This will also be  bad for the conference that Stanford competes in (the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation) because Nebraska is one of the four teams that competes against us.

Unfortunately, this type of thing has been going on for a while.  After all, MIT dropped their gym program just this year.  It’s sad thinking that 30 years ago, almost every school had a gymnastics program.  It’s also scary to think that pretty soon, NCAA gymnasts might become endangered athletes.  I guess all I can do now is cross my fingers and just hope that the situation for men’s collegiate gymnastics will improve…