You must have been thrilled to see Stephen Nedoroscik performing pommel horse on the ‘Dedication Night’ of the ‘Dancing With The Stars’. But he did not do it just to show off his excellent mastery over it and snag points. Behind dedicating the night to his beloved sport, sat a hard-hitting fact. “I wanted to make that a point because the sport itself has been slowly dying… to make sure this sport not only is surviving but thriving. The sport is everything. I have done it since I was four and a half,” Stephen had said after his performance, indicating the decline of male gymnastics in the country over decades.

Data from the NCAA shows in 1981, there were 59 Division I men’s gymnastics programs. It has dropped to 12 — a 79.6% decrease — in 2024. Amid that, Ohio State University further added to the misery. In October it announced to cut athletic scholarships for men’s gymnastics. And imagine the timing. It came right after the U.S. men’s gymnastics team earned its first Olympic team medal in 16 years (Beijing 2008). So, Stephen, like many, was upset with the development and he did not hold back from expressing that.

“Ohio State removing athletic scholarships from Men’s Gymnastics. Yet again, another step backwards for MGYM. With the success of current and former NCAA gymnasts at the Olympics you’d think NCAA programs would be excited for the upcoming season, not stripping away opportunities,” he had written on his X last month. And he did not just stop there. Recently, he starred in an episode of Mythical Kitchen with Josh Scherer, where he dished on his whole journey—including this issue that clearly stings.

During the conversation, the topic of gymnastics funding came up, and that’s when Stephen Nedoroscik went deeper. He said, “Since like the 1980s NCAA programs have been dropping, dropping, drop and drop. Even like recent days, like Ohio state just cut their scholarships.” Here, Ohio’s case might look even more surprising if you look at the money matter.

According to USA Today, Ohio State’s athletic department generated $251.6 million in revenue in the last fiscal year, ranking it first in the nation and the second-highest revenue ever earned by an athletic department in a single year. Point Its 36 sports sponsorships are more than double the 14 mandated by the NCAA for NCAA Division I membership, one of the highest varsity sponsorship counts in the NCAA. And guess what?

According to the 2023 EADA Survey, Operating (Game-Day) Expenses for each male gymnast is $8,572. They have 21 in the program, so that comes down to $180,017 for the entire male contingent. How could the program that snagged $250,000,000 not afford that?

Moreover, OSU hosted the 2024 NCAA Championship in men’s gymnastics at the on-campus, 3700-seat Covelli Center, where the Buckeyes finished 6th behind Stanford, Michigan, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Illinois. The program has won three national titles, fifteen Big Ten titles, and five Nissen Award winners as the NCAA’s best male gymnast.

“It’s pretty insane that we have this beautiful sport where like, so many great people are a part of it and just like work their life for it. And no one’s really respecting it the amount that they should,” Stephen said, adding that he wanted to bring the sport out of this misery using his platform. “Like my biggest thing is I’d love to see this sport do a 180 and start growing popularity in the United States,” he added. If this was not enough, he directly took a jab at NCAA.

“Like I got DMs and phone calls about these club programs that are like getting more little kids to join like than they’ve ever seen. So like that made me so happy but like it feels like the NCAA specifically just isn’t doing their part of keeping these programs funded and alive.” Alongside, Nedoroscik points to a bigger picture here: financial neglect is threatening all Olympic sports in the U.S.

In his Mythical Kitchen interview, Nedoroscik didn’t mince words. “If you’re not supporting Olympic sports, you’re not really supporting the United States at the Olympic stage,” he said, highlighting how NCAA is practically the only path for male gymnasts in the U.S. “NCAA is a direct funnel,” he explained, noting that without it, male gymnasts don’t have many options for income.

The outlook? Pretty grim. Nedoroscik shared his own experience to illustrate the struggle: “Outside of NCAA, a lot of guys retire early because they can’t be self funded gymnasts. Like the sport itself is like a lifestyle. And if I were to have to work as an electrical engineer and then go after my, you know, nine to five and train pommel horse, I’d probably be pretty bad.” Lauren Hopkins, founder of the GymTernet blog also voiced the same.

“There are so few opportunities outside of the Olympics and NCAA scholarships that it’s hard to keep kids in the sport,” Hopkins had said. A majority of the 2024 men’s team were collegiate athletes, including all from the 2024 Paris Olympics who either went to Stanford or Michigan.

“Almost every collegiate institution is a mini national training center. You just cannot supplement, provide support for Olympic athletes better than a collegiate program does. You have nutritionists. You have sport’s psychologist, you have multiple coaches,” Justin Spring, member of the 2008 Olympic medal-winning male team said. So cutting off that pipeline is detrimental for the sport. It is all the more humiliating when someone is a gymnast at a varsity team, and the program gets cut off. Take Shane Wiskus, a member of the US’s 2020 Tokyo Olympic team, for instance.

He was a senior at the University of Minnesota, where his team placed second in the NCAA championships. Afterward, the men’s gymnastics program was cut. Notably, the downturn of male gymnastics seems to start from the high school level itself.

According to the 2018-19 high school athletics participation survey conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations, just 104 schools supported boys’ gymnastics with 1580 participants in comparison to 1578 schools funding girls’ programs with 18658 participants. 46 states in the USA offered no high school men’s gymnastics programs.

One of the main culprits some observers have pointed to is the ask to comply with Title IX programs and balancing budgets. (Title IX forbids discrimination based on sex in schools that receive federal funds.) So, the observers say, to achieve equity between men’s and women’s athletics, schools tended to cut men’s sports like swimming, diving, track and field, and gymnastics. In a 60 Minutes interview, historian Victoria Jackson, who specializes in the history of college sports at ASU, had an interesting take on this.

“Every time there’s an economic downturn, you protect the core business, which is football. Which means that other sports are on the chopping block,” Jackson had said. Understandably, Sports like football and basketball bring in hundreds of millions in revenue each year from ticket sales to television contracts. Men’s gymnastics just doesn’t have that pull. But the good news is that NCAA is actively considering steps to overturn the grim picture.

The NCAA is in active talks with USA Gymnastics about how to revamp its collegiate men’s gymnastics championships.The talks have occurred as part of Team USA’s College Sports Sustainability Think Tank, an initiative launched in 2020 to help bridge the gap between NCAA sports and the Olympics.

The NCAA men’s gymnastics championship is now a two-day format. There is no longer a separate day for individual finals. The think tank is considering expanding that men’s event to four days—qualifiers, rest day, team final, and individual disciplines, which could better promote the stories of specific athletes and create more time and space for an overlapping USAG event, according to Alyssa Rice, the NCAA’s assistant director of championships. While this happens, Stephen has several voices standing by his side.

Stephen Nedoroscik’s inner circle stands firmly by his side in this advocacy

The troubling trend in NCAA gymnastics hasn’t gone unnoticed. Key figures who understand the sport’s struggles—like rising star Fred Richard and Stephen’s mom, Cheryl Nedoroscik—are speaking out. They know exactly where the pain points lie.

Fred Richard, for instance, didn’t hold back when he addressed the issue, taking aim at the NCAA itself. “Most males aren’t choosing gymnastics when they first choose a sport,” he pointed out, hinting at the core problem: the financial support just isn’t there. This lack of funding drives young athletes toward sports with better financial prospects, like basketball.

Stephen’s mom, Cheryl, went even further. As someone who’s watched her son grow in gymnastics, she’s all too familiar with the current landscape—and she knows how much it’s shrunk. Speaking with Worcester Telegram & Gazette, she reflected on how things have changed. “If you go back to the ‘80s, there were 120 universities that had a men’s gymnastic team. Now, in Division One, there is only 12. And there’s four that are Division Three.” Despite it all, Cheryl remains hopeful, holding onto the vision of a brighter future for the sport.

In her subsequent conversation, she added,  “(The University of) Illinois was talking about dropping their men’s program but the coach thinks that Steve single-handedly saved their program for next year. The Sterling Academy of Gymnastics in Sterling, Massachusetts, where Stephen trained when he was here, has been inundated with so many young men that want to join the team now…Everybody’s talking about how enrollment is huge right now and I think a lot of that is because of Stephen and the USA Men’s Gymnastics Team.” If that holds true, you can bet no one would be happier than Stephen Nedoroscik!