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Where Did the Gym Class Vault Go? A Look At How Liability Caused A Decline in Men’s Gymnastics

Burlington High School’s gymnastics room, one of the last remaining gymnastics-dedicated high school gyms in Massachusetts. (Photo by Kat Cornetta, February 2022.)

The following originally appeared on StickItMedia in February 2020. The site is having some errors at the moment, so I thought it important that this moves over here for the time being. This is relevant again as Massachusetts once again debates if boys gymnastics should remain a high school sport.

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Many men’s gymnastics followers point to the impact of Title IX as providing a critical blow to the sport on the collegiate level. However, an in-depth look at the history of gymnastics in education over the past 60 years shows that while Title IX is used as an excuse to eliminate collegiate teams, there were several elements that offered up men’s gymnastics to the chopping block. It was a perfect storm of court cases involving risk, injury and liability in physical education classes and school sports and a change in media coverage.

The Court Cases

A sequence of Illinois Supreme Court decisions is an example of the increase in litigation surrounding physical education and school athletes, and the dates of these cases align with the drop in school gymnastics programs and thus, the popularity of gymnastics amongst men.

These four cases have far more impact on men’s participation in gymnastics than any enforcement of Title IX:

Kobylanski vs. Chicago Board of Education (1976)
Chilton vs. Cook County School District (1976)
Gerrity vs. Beatty (1978)
Thomas vs. Chicago Board of Education (1979)

These four court cases established perimeters of liability when it came to activities in a physical education (P.E.) curriculum, equipment used in P.E. and varsity sports, and the duty of care of teachers and coaches in both P.E. and varsity activities. Kobylanski and Chilton directly relate to gymnastics, as both cases involve gymnastics exercises done in a P.E. class; one case involved still rings, the other trampoline.

These cases (and I’m sure others) established a few changes of tide in the teaching of physical education at the time: liability for a student’s accidental injury falls on the school, not the individual teacher (unless the student can establish “willful and wanton misconduct” on the part of the teacher) and liability regarding the safety of equipment falls on the school and not the individual coach or teacher.

Schools began to look at physical education curriculums to increase safety and mitigate any potential legal problems, and gymnastics began to get cut. While balance beam, parallel bars, vault, trampoline, rope climb and more used to be regular gym class activities, around 1978, they start disappearing from the curriculum. This trend continues throughout the 1980s. When existing equipment broke, it was not replaced, but phased out. When new schools were built and gymnasiums were stocked, gymnastics equipment was not ordered.

When gymnastics starts to disappear from the curriculum, you lose a chance to introduce the sport to children. This is the final shove that puts control of the sport in the hands of clubs and not schools. If you want to learn the sport, you now have to be aware of it outside of the school environment, have a club nearby, and have the money to afford classes. This eliminates gymnastics as a possible activity for many children in lower economic classes. Even for the middle classes, if you can spend X amount to try gymnastics, or you spend half of that to try T-ball.

If gymnastics equipment no longer was around school, how could a school sponsor a high school gymnastics team? They would have to find a local club to take on the team and find the room to rent or lease the space in their already-tight budgets. Will that club insist that one of their coaches lead the team instead of the use of one of the school’s teachers? Is any of that cost in line with the number of students coming out for the team?

But these factors alone did not cause the precipitous drop in popularity of the sport among men. This was part of a perfect storm that started in 1972, when how the sport is presented to the public begins to change. The marketing of gymnastics as a “female” sport starts in 1972, grows in 1976, and starts to have significant impact on the numbers of male gymnasts in 1979.

I have been working on this project since 2017, and welcome any suggestions, material or input. Please email me at katcornetta@gmail.com

The latest

It’s been quite a bit. Quite a lot happened since the last time I logged in here, but I’ll spare you the details.

I’m now a freelancer for the Boston Globe’s sports department. Here are some things I’ve written lately.

I’m still contributing to Boston Moms. Here are my last few posts:

I am hoping to do more here in the coming months. There’s a great need for quality writing in both the figure skating and gymnastics worlds, and I need to get off my behind and do more. I toyed around with creating a newsletter, and I still may, but I have to make sure it’s something I have the time to maintain.

On Writing, Working and Family

For the first time in over a decade, my office decided to add positions. We had acquired staff via mergers or reorganization, but we had not had the opportunity to add staff we sorely needed.

I was coming back from my second maternity leave as both positions were announced and posted. I shared the positions on my LinkedIn account, posting, “I get to be your assistant, so you should apply.”

Then someone messaged me asking a hard question: why wasn’t I applying for either job? I’ve been in the office nearly 13 years and have a Master’s degree in Educational Administration. One would think that I’m qualified.

I paused as I realized the really difficult answer.

“Because I’ve spent the last seven years chasing something else.”


Since I was a teenager, I had wanted to be a sportswriter. I wanted to cover figure skating and gymnastics. After reading the Sports Illustrated coverage of Steve Young finally winning Super Bowl XXIX, I decided I also wanted to cover football. I originally went to college for sports journalism and ran into a professor freshman year who discouraged the three of us females in his class from pursuing it. I took that to heart and changed majors and transferred schools. But I continued blogging about sports, and then found myself picking up freelance gigs. First I wrote about lacrosse for the Examiner, then Inside Lacrosse, then the Newton Patch and things began to snowball from there. It took up some of my weekends, but wasn’t too intrusive.

Seven years ago, I got a surprise message from a Boston newspaper asking me to write about high school sports. I honestly thought it was a hoax, until I confirmed with a friend that the editor contacting me was indeed a real person. Holy smokes, a real newspaper in a major city — a city much larger than my home city of Rochester, NY — wanted me to write for them. How could I turn that down?

The schedule took some time to get used to, but soon enough, I was working 2-4 days a week. I would leave my day job at 5pm, and then go to the newspaper or to a game assignment. I worked at least one weekend day, if not both. I loved it. Some writers believe they are “better than” covering high school sports. Where I grew up, high school sports were everything, so to me, covering high school sports is as good of a beat as you can have.

I kept taking assignments, picking up shifts, and picking up freelance gigs, thinking, “I must be on the brink. If I work really hard at this, someone will hire me full-time, right?” It began to intrude on my day job and my marriage. My husband went days without seeing each other, with him traveling out to Western Massachusetts for work nearly every other day, and me finding myself either taking scores or covering a game every night. Our relationship was not in the best place. At my day job, I stopped being able to stay late and meet with students. I shrugged off networking events in my field and never went to conferences. I used my vacation time to cover sporting events, not take an actual vacation. I couldn’t work on Saturdays, something crucial to working with college students, because I was covering sports.

Soon I had kids, and I tried not to miss a beat. If I keep going, then soon I’ll be able to freelance full-time and take the kids out of daycare.

The bankruptcy of the newspaper didn’t stop me. Writers losing jobs around me didn’t stop me. This is going to work out, I swear. This is what I’m meant to do.

Until this month.

This month, I had to face the depressing realization that maybe sportswriting isn’t what I’m meant to do. I can’t keep juggling everything. I missed deadlines. I missed my kids. I found myself depressed, anxious, and angry at myself for not being able to make everything work.

When I say yes to a sports writing gig, it means I’m saying no to something else. My day job and my family have been receiving a whole bunch of nos. Someone close to me once asked if my writing was a hobby or a career. They thought I should look at it as a hobby, and maybe they are right. Maybe I’m just meant to write online here and there. If I earn some extra money from doing so, that’s great.

That is a really difficult thing to make terms with, and it won’t happen overnight. I had to prioritize my family and day job over covering my favorite high school sporting event of the year this weekend. I wanted to say yes to the assignment in the worst way. But I had to say no. It was a punch in the gut.

I am sharing this because I know many part-time sportswriters who have struggled with this same call. When do you call it quits? Should you ever call it quits, and just keep a toe in writing forever, holding out hope that something will work out? We’re told to find our passion and make that our career, but what if that just never pans out?

I don’t have the answers at all. It’s going to take me a long time to find them.

The Two Greg Zuerleins

You’re getting ready for Super Bowl Sunday. You’re familiarizing yourself with the rosters of both the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams. You see Greg Zuerlein, the Rams’ kicker, and head to YouTube to watch a few of his past field goals.

And instead of field goals, you find figure skating.

No, the Rams’ “Greg The Leg” didn’t have a past life as a figure skater. He just happens to share a name with a former World Junior Champion skater whose former partner is a two-time Olympian.

Greg Zuerlein was the 2009 World Junior Champion in ice dance with Madison Chock. If Chock’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she has represented the U.S. at both the 2014 and 2018 Olympics with current partner Evan Bates (a three-time Olympian in his own right.) Chock and Zuerlein competed from 2006-11, winning not only that World Junior title, but a National junior title, a bronze on the senior level at Nationals and a top ten finish at the World Championships.

The name “Greg Zuerlein” isn’t exactly like the name “John Smith.” What are the odds that two high-level athletes would share the exact same name? I don’t know if the two happen to be related, though I’m sure it would have come up in skating circles prior to Super Bowl Weekend if they were.

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