Derrin Moore could imagine the sight, even if she couldn’t be there.
Fortunately, she knew a parent who was on hand to describe the scene: Morgan Price and Kyrstin Johnson, gymnasts from historically Black schools, sharing an embrace as they finished in the top three during the USA Gymnastics women’s collegiate national championships April 13 in West Chester , Pa.
Price, a sophomore from Fisk University in Nashville, would win a national title in the all-around, becoming the first athlete from an HBCU to win a collegiate gymnastics national championship. A day later, Johnson, a freshman at Talladega College in Alabama, won a national title in the vault.
For Moore, founder of Brown Girls Do Gymnastics, the image was surreal, a representation of the work her organization has done to diversify the sport.
“I could just imagine that picture of the two of them from opposing HBCUs, in first and third. It was an amazing thing to hear,” Moore said. “It’s been years trying to make this happen, and to see it come to fruition is literally a dream come true.”
For Price, the accomplishment was the culmination of a long journey.
The child of standout athletes, Price said she began gymnastics attending mommy-and-me classes at 2 years old. Her mother, Marsha, is a former Vanderbilt cheerleader, and her father, Chris, played in the Kansas City Royals’ minor league system before he died in a motorcycle crash when Price was 6.
Growing up in Tennessee and later in the Dallas suburb of Coppell, Price said there were few Black athletes in the gyms she frequented. She wanted to attend an HBCU, but none offered gymnastics programs at the time, so she committed to Arkansas, a flourishing program for which her older sister Frankie competes.
In February 2022, Fisk announced that he would launch the first HBCU artistic gymnastics program that fell. By spring, a 16-year-old Price had graduated high school early and switched his commitment to Fisk.
There, she would compete under an African American coach for the first time. And she relished the community around her, surrounded by teammates who could do her lashes, hair and nails the way she liked.
“I’ve always wanted to go to an HBCU and do gymnastics, but before this happened, I never had the opportunity,” Price said. “My next goal was to be an SEC gymnast, and so that’s why I committed to the University of Arkansas on a full ride. When this came about, I was like: ‘Oh my gosh, it’s right by my hometown. They’re starting this year, and even though they don’t have as much as Arkansas might have, I know that this decision will mean so much more than just gymnastics.’ ”
The NCAA’s gymnastics championships concluded April 20 with Florida, Utah and California among those vying for the title, which was won by LSU. That competition is dominated by schools from major conferences that can offer the maximum of 12 scholarships per year. Conversely, the USA Gymnastics national championships are geared toward smaller schools that offer fewer than eight full scholarships.
Price qualified for nationals as a freshman during Fisk’s inaugural season last year and earned first-team all-American honors, but she “didn’t really compete to the best of my ability.”
In this year’s final, Price twisted off the uneven bars and stuck the landing to clinch the national championship with an all-around score of 39.225. She also earned first-team all-American distinction in vault, bars and floor. Teammates Liberty Mora and Aliyah Reed-Hammon were named second-team all-Americans in the balance beam and vault, respectively.
Johnson, the Talladega freshman who hails from Baltimore, scored a 9.875 to earn the vault title a day later — after finishing runner-up in the floor exercise and third in the all-around. Talladega teammates Kiora Peart-Williams (vault), Alondra Maldonado (beam) and Alexa Chuy (all-around) also earned first-team all-American honors.
“This is such a young team. To come together this quickly and build a culture of excellence, it’s hard to find the words,” Talladega Coach Aja Sims-Fletcher said. “It’s exciting, it’s emotional. …I cannot wait for the future.”
At 28, Sims-Fletcher didn’t expect to be running a college program, much less experiencing such success so soon. A three-time all-American at Alabama, Sims-Fletcher was a volunteer for the Crimson Tide in 2022 while nurturing hopes of next becoming an assistant coach. That December, while at a grocery store, she received a call from Moore, who said Talladega was interested.
Sims-Fletcher doubted she had the experience for a head coaching role, but mentors assured her she could grow into it. She wanted to shape the team in the image of an elite program and, as she set out to recruit her inaugural roster, Moore connected Sims-Fletcher with her first target: Johnson.
Like Price, Johnson wanted to attend an HBCU, hoping to compete at a school where she felt she would not need to change herself to fit in. But midway through her high school career, she had none of her gymnastics programs. After Fisk’s announcement in 2022, Johnson committed to the Bulldogs but later switched allegiances after bonding with Sims-Fletcher.
Price and Johnson see themselves as stewards of budding legacies at their schools. They want their presence to be a reminder that girls who look like them can find a home and continue their gymnastics careers at HBCUs — and that competing for an HBCU invites success, rather than precludes it.
Their aspirations dovetail with Moore’s mission. Although Brown Girls Do Gymnastics generally works to increase diversity and inclusion in gymnastics and circus arts, it has led the push to start HBCU gymnastics programs since 2018. The organization has pitched the idea of a program to around 30 HBCUs since then.
In time, BGDG helped schools raise money to support those programs, offered resources to lighten coaches’ and administrators’ workloads, and helped establish a talent pipeline from girls in their organization to Fisk and Talladega, the lone HBCU gymnastics programs.
BGDG helped Fisk recruit Coach Corrinne Tarver, who in 1989, while competing for Georgia, became the first Black gymnast to win the all-around title at the NCAA national championship. Sims-Fletcher called Moore her “unofficial assistant coach” in the weeks before she hired her staff at Talladega. BGDG provided leotards for her team and helped Sims-Fletcher communicate the program’s broader needs to the school.
“A huge support system,” Sims-Fletcher said of BGDG. “They’re always posting us and shouting us out, and obviously that program has just helped us in so many ways.”
Moore’s latest triumph is at Wilberforce University, an HBCU near Dayton, Ohio. The school in February announced the launch of its women’s gymnastics team in partnership with Brown Girls Do Gymnastics. The team is slated to start competing in 2026.
That growth has fed Moore’s excitement for BGDG’s objectives, but the early success at Fisk and Talladega has been most heartening.
“There are first-year schools that come in and everyone’s happy because gymnastics is growing. But they aren’t winning championships,” Moore said. “When you have two teams that come from schools that are under-resourced, they don’t have gyms on the campus, and they have been looked at for so long as schools that can’t handle a gymnastics program, and then you see six national qualifiers from a school in its inaugural year. … It’s not just that they are growing the sport of gymnastics. “They’re changing the landscape of the sport of gymnastics.”
