First professional gymnastics league set to launch next year

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- The U.S. women’s gymnastics team hauled in eight medals in the Paris Olympics. Now many of them are being asked: what’s next?  

There will be a tour, per usual, after the games so fans can see the “Golden Girls” perform in-person and celebrate, but what comes next?

“For so long gymnasts’ careers end because there’s not opportunity and options,” said Dominique Moceanu, who at 14-years-old in 1996 was part of the gold medal winning women’s team. “And it's like, what do you do the rest of your life? You've invested your whole childhood into the sport. And now what?” 

There is nothing professionally available for gymnasts … yet. Now, a group of women are trying to change that.  
 
"You know you shouldn't be 22, 23 years old and thinking about retirement and going through this mourning transition when you are in your peak fitness,” said Aimee Boorman, one of the Co-Founders of the Global Impact Gymnastics Alliance (GIGA) – a group looking to start the sport’s first professional league in 2025.  

Boorman has seen the struggles even the most successful gymnasts go through after the Olympic Games first-hand. She coached Simone Biles from childhood all the way to her gold medal in Rio in 2016. She said that people would ask her why Simone would keep going in gymnastics when she’s already an Olympic champion.  
 
“Would you ever ask a Tom Brady why would you ever go to the Super Bowl again you've already done it?” Boorman laughed and threw her hands in the air. “No one does that!” 

Boorman, along with fellow GIGA co-founders Maura Fox and LaPrise Williams, is looking to give gymnasts options, whether that’s in their post-Olympic gymnastics life, post-World Championship career or post-collegiate world.  

Fox is the organization’s Chief Executive Officer, and brings her entrepreneurship experience along with more than 20 years in sports, media, technology and entertainment. The women know that one of the keys for GIGA’s success is eyeballs.  

“Gymnastics has the number one viewership in the Olympics,” Boorman explained, which NBC4 researched and saw to be true in the U.S. according to Statista. “It being an Olympic year it definitely seems like we should be seizing that moment and jump on it and say, ‘Hey! Why do you only get excited about gymnastics once every four years?' The NCAA and ESPN have been showing over the past few years what incredible viewership they have in the college season as well.” 

Williams, GIGA’s Chief Sports Engagement Officer, has a wealth of experience in the gymnastics world: from owning a club gym in Texas that produced multiple Division-I gymnasts and USA National Team members, to coaching tumbling and acrobatics at Baylor University, to having worked internationally for the Dutch National Team and St Vincent and the Grenadines Gymnastics Association.  

Boorman, the league’s Chief Events Officer, said the timing isn’t just about the Olympics but also about the excitement over women’s sports in the U.S. Still, the unique aspects of this U.S. gold medal women’s team helps tie everything together: they are the oldest team since 1952, they have multiple collegiate gymnasts on the squad -- a first -- and they prove you can have fun and still be competitive.  

“Instead of those women going to college and ending their gymnastics career and that being their pinnacle, now they are going to have something to look forward to past college,” Boorman said. “These women are like, 'I'm in peak physical condition and I'm going to keep going because I can.'” 

The goal is for this league to be like any other professional sport in that it’s not a fun hobby. It’s a career.  

“They make a salary. They're insured. They have paid maternity leave," Boorman said. "I mean, we're we're looking at this as how do we provide a career for these women moving forward as any professional athlete should be taken care of."

The gymnastics will operate with a combination of collegiate and Olympic-level rules. The scoring will be out of a 10.0, which is typically easier to understand and more fun for viewers. The focus will be on performance and impressive skills, not the most difficult skills.  

“We are not putting as high of a pressure on elements that tend to lead to injury that would shorten a gymnast’s lifespan,” Boorman said.

She said at the start, the competitions would be individuals, but the hope is to eventually work in some sort of team aspect and have multiple training facilities across the country. 

So who would those individuals be? Boorman said the group is already talking for former Olympians, former World Championship competitors, former collegiate gymnasts and women who are currently in college who are expected to graduate in 2025.  
 
“Our goal is not to take athletes who have NCAA eligibility. It’s to get them after so we can have a draft," Boorman said. "And we can have all of our training facility coaches come together and they do a draft and they are drafting athletes out of college so these women have a place to go post-college."  

This idea idea sounds promising to Moceanu.  

“To have more options in our sport is going to be a beautiful thing,” she said.