Precision decision

After a quarter-century and nine national championships, Georgia gymnastics coach Suzanne Yoculan is in her final season.

“All In For 10” is the working title of her swan song, as the most accomplished coach on campus attempts to push her title count into double figures. And end on the number that, coincidentally, is gymnastics shorthand for perfection.

This is the first of two reports on her final season, a look at a singular personality/program-builder. Part II is scheduled for the close of her career, presumably April’s NCAA championships.

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Athens —- The Last Season did not open to the blare of trumpets and a chorus of huzzahs.

Every now and then, you might like it to be nice and easy. But there’s just one thing. Suzanne Yoculan never, ever does nothing nice and easy.

Her Gym Dogs had fallen about like drunken sailors —- relatively speaking —- in the first meet, against West Virginia on Jan. 9. They had won, but with the lowest team score in more than three seasons (195.425).

Someone asked Yoculan if this bunch bore any resemblance to a four-time defending national champion.

“Are you kidding me?” she said. “We are in big trouble unless some things change —- and things will change.”

What was called for on the first day back to practice was the ol’ coach’s Heimlich.

Before that workout, she took up a perch on a counter at the front of the Gym Dogs meeting room. Barely making a dent in their big, theater-style chairs, her petite athletes grew quiet.

Up on the dry erase board, associate head coach Jay Clark —- Yoculan’s designated replacement next season —- wrote three words in big letters: Fitness, Skill, Effort.

Now, Yoculan told her gymnasts, rate yourself in each category between 1 and 5.

“If you’re all not a 5,” she said, her voice gaining an added edge, “it’s your fault. If you’re going out the night before practice and then can’t perform in practice, it’s your fault. If you’re not confident in all those areas, it’s going to catch up to you.”

She was on a roll. Those on the team who are not competing need to get more involved in supporting those who are, Yoculan said. The freshmen need to start stepping up. To the others who contributed to six glaring missteps against West Virginia, she said, “A lot of you are in major overload,” meaning they were distracted by their doubts.

Secret of success

That behind-the-scenes lecture was classic Yoculan. It was meant to challenge, to provoke a change. A similar blunt assessment had upset a few of the parents attending a team dinner that weekend. But there is no time to tiptoe —- never has been, with her.

Otherwise, you don’t take a program that averaged 200 fans a meet when Yoculan arrived in 1984 to one that attracts more than 11,000 now (outdrawing men’s basketball). You don’t join women’s basketball coach Andy Landers in a public fight for upgraded pay (1994) —- and win. You don’t get to practice in the finest facility in the 67-team world of D-I women’s gymnastics.

When asked the secret to Yoculan’s success, Landers said, “It’s her drive, her persistence, her constant self-motivation to do things better, to do them differently.”

That drive has had its price through the years. A divorce; all that time away from her two children, now grown; every profile story about her dwelling on the peers she has feuded with and those on her own campus she has alienated. Significantly, it was one of Vince Dooley’s last acts as athletics director in 2004 to self-report an NCAA violation that cost Yoculan a precious scholarship.

“I’m misunderstood,” she said.

Aren’t all artists?

The differences are what separate Yoculan and her program from everyone else. They are what makes it all come together when the building is full and winning depends upon that next ridiculous, Cirque du Soleil flip on a four-inch wide balance beam.

Yoculan forever is sewing challenges into her hug-a-minute world of gymnastics.

One small example: Unlike most teams in any sport, the Gym Dogs don’t have captains. Yoculan doesn’t believe in them.

“Leadership is everyone’s responsibility,” she said. “Everyone needs to learn to speak for themselves.”

At 55, Yoculan says she is at her peak, with a more perfect understanding of herself and her athletes.

She’s not as apt to throw a shoe across the gym or candy at a gymnast (some of her greatest hits from the past). She has learned not to even address the team after a meet, giving herself time to filter the results. Tirelessly as ever, she’ll pump up her program (although one recent idea of a poster for a charity event featuring her gymnasts in tights and stiletto heels was vetoed by the administration as too provocative).

Ready to move on

All of which makes the retirement thing all the more puzzling.

“Pretty simple,” she said. “It’s time. Time for me personally. My parents are in their 90s and I’d like to spend more time with them. Don [Leebern, the board of regents member with whom she lives] has retired. He has sacrificed so much for me, I’d like to be there for him.

“Time for the program. Time for [new coach] Jay and Julie [Clark’s wife, a former Gym Dog and current assistant] to step in. They’re ready.

“I don’t have anything left on my gymnastics bucket list.”

Faced with sending their coach out on the proper note, the Gym Dogs have begun responding. In a grueling stretch of three meets in one week, ending Friday, they have beaten Nos. 14 LSU, 3 Utah and 9 Alabama.

Along each step, they have increased their team score, and were sent into a well-earned weekend off by Courtney Kupets’ two 10s against Alabama.

Happiness is a beaten Tide.

“There’s no team in the history of my career I’d rather beat than Alabama,” said Yoculan, enjoying this rest stop in a long Last Season.

Her approach after that first shaky meet was being validated almost daily.

“It has been a heart change for everyone on the team,” junior Grace Taylor said.

Inevitably, Yoculan herself may have changed a little over the years.

“There have been some times that things have happened on the floor and we’ve gotten upset with each other,” said Utah coach Greg Marsden, whose record of nine national titles Yoculan is attempting to break. “But both of us have mellowed a little bit over the years.”

“She probably has become more sensitive to people,” Landers said.

“When you’re young and ambitious, you step on toes and don’t even know it. Now, she’s sensitive enough to either warn ‘em or apologize to ‘em.”

One constant remains in place, though, for a few months more. Yoculan still nurtures the program that everyone else in gymnastics chases.

SUZANNE YOCULAN’S TROPHY CASE

> Nine National Championships

> 20 NCAA Regional Championships

> 16 SEC Championships

> Five-time National Coach of the Year

> 33 Individual NCAA Champions

> Overall record of 807-116-7

Source: University of Georgia