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.”

AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports

FILE - LSU's Aleah Finnegan competes on the floor exercise during the NCAA women's gymnastics championships in Fort Worth, Texas, April 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, File)

FILE - LSU's Aleah Finnegan competes on the balance beam during the NCAA women's gymnastics championships in Fort Worth, Texas, April 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, File)

FILE - UCLA's Jordan Chiles performs her floor routine during an NCAA college gymnastics meet against Stanford, March 9, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Tracy Herriott, file)

FILE - Utah's Grace McCallum completes on the floor exercise during the NCAA women's gymnastics championships, April 14, 2022, in Fort Worth, Texas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, file)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been thrown into two top national security jobs at once as President Donald Trump presses forward with his top-to-bottom revamp of U.S. foreign policy, upending not only longstanding policies that the former Florida senator once supported but also the configuration of the executive branch.

Trump's appointment of Rubio to temporarily replace Mike Waltz as national security adviser is the first major leadership shake-up of the nascent administration, but Waltz's removal had been rumored for weeks — ever since he created a Signal group chat and accidentally added a journalist to the conversation where top national security officials shared sensitive military plans.

So, just over 100 days into his tenure as America’s top diplomat, Rubio now becomes just the second person to hold both positions. He follows only the late Henry Kissinger, who served as both secretary of state and national security adviser for two years under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the 1970s.

Rubio — a one-time Trump rival and hawkish conservative who was derided by the president as “Little Marco” during the 2016 presidential campaign — has proven adept at aligning himself with Trump’s “America First” foreign policy positions. Rubio has largely eschewed his staunch advocacy of providing foreign aid and promoting democracy overseas since taking over the State Department, repeating a refrain that every policy or program should make America safer, stronger or more prosperous.

Since being confirmed in a 99-0 Senate floor vote, Rubio has presided over a radical reorganization of the State Department. That includes the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and plans to cut U.S. jobs by 15% while closing or consolidating more than 100 bureaus worldwide. He has also begun a major cull of the visa system, revoking hundreds, if not thousands, of visas issued to foreign students.

He has overseen the negotiation of agreements to send immigrants accused of crimes to third countries, most notably to El Salvador, in cases that are now being challenged in federal courts.

“Marco Rubio, unbelievable," Trump said Thursday before announcing on social media that Waltz would be nominated as ambassador to the United Nations and Rubio would take over as national security adviser in the interim. "When I have a problem, I call up Marco, he gets it solved.”

That's a far cry from 2016, when Rubio and Trump were competing for the GOP presidential nomination and Rubio warned that Trump was a threat. After Trump won, the relationship remained contentious, but eight years later, Rubio was an enthusiastic Trump supporter who worked his Florida bona fides to get into the president's inner circle.

Yet, even after Rubio was nominated to the top diplomatic job, doubts remained. Many pundits suggested he would last only a short time in office before Trump dismissed him in the same way he did his first-term secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who was fired by tweet in 2018 just 18 months into the job.

Yet Rubio has been resilient. And as of Thursday, he oversees both the State Department and the National Security Council, which is responsible for coordinating all executive branch foreign policy functions, ranging from diplomatic to military and intelligence operations.

Thomas Wright, an NSC official during the Biden administration who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the national security adviser post alone is “more than a full-time job.”

“It is just very hard to comprehend the idea that you can do this job sort of part time,” Wright said.

He said he watched national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his deputy work 14-15 hour days, six to seven days a week: “I think they felt that they had to do that to do the job properly.”

Appearing Thursday night on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity," Rubio was not asked to weigh in on the president’s decision to tap him as national security adviser but did joke that he was barred from adding pope to his list of many jobs because he is married.

But as he marked the first 100 days of Trump's latest term, Rubio applauded the president for his vision.

“I am honored by the trust President Trump placed in me and I am proud of the work the Department of State has done over the past hundred days to implement his agenda and put the American people first,” he wrote Wednesday in a State Department Substack post.

One of Rubio’s former Florida statehouse colleagues, Dan Gelber, a Democrat, said of Rubio's increasing responsibilities that "Marco is probably, to a certain extent, one of the more reliable Cabinet officers, if not the most reliable."

“And I can only believe those qualities are even more vital to his current confluence of positions and growing portfolio,” Gelber said. "He’s not a chaos guy, and I’ve always sort of wondered how he’s going to do in an administration where there seems to be so much chaos. And maybe that’s why he’s getting all these positions.”

Rubio's dual-hatted role comes on top of him serving as acting administrator of the largely shut down USAID and as acting head of the National Archives. It puts him in a similar position to that of Trump's longtime personal friend and golfing buddy Steve Witkoff.

As a special envoy, Witkoff is the lead U.S. negotiator in the Iran nuclear talks and in administration peace efforts for the Israel-Hamas war and the Ukraine-Russia war.

In many ways, Rubio and Witkoff are following in the footsteps of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had multiple roles in the first administration, ranging from the Middle East to Latin America and immigration.

State Department officials appeared taken aback by Trump's appointment of Rubio as acting national security adviser. Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said at a briefing Thursday that she learned the news from a journalist who asked her a question about Trump's post minutes after it appeared on social media.

Officials, however, have noted that Rubio in recent weeks has spent an increasingly large amount of time at the White House away from his posh seventh-floor State Department office in what is known as “Mahogany Row,” a corridor known for its wood paneling.

At the same time, these officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the personnel shift, said they did not expect Rubio's duties as secretary of state to change significantly. He still plans to travel on diplomatic missions abroad and likely will delegate at least some of the NSC management to others, they said.

Amiri reported from the United Nations.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, stands with French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot at the State Department, Thursday, May 1, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden of the White House, Thursday, May 1, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in Washington, as President Donald Trump look on. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)