COLUMBIA, Mo. — Amari Celestine remembers where she was when she realized the narrative around Missouri gymnastics was changing. Someone shouted “M-I-Z†to her in the airport. At the nail salon, somebody else offered a raving review of the team that finished fifth in the nation the season before.
That was in the summer of 2022, when the Tigers were fresh off, yes, a fifth-place finish at the NCAA Tournament. As a freshman, Celestine was a two-event All-American that season, an immediate contributor as part of a recruiting class that was ranked fourth in the nation before they ever swung around a collegiate set of uneven bars or charged toward a vault.
The four gymnasts from that class who have stuck around — Celestine, Grace Anne Davis, Alonna Kratzer and Jocelyn Moore — are now juniors leading No. 9 Mizzou into the mix of the nation’s best programs. It’s a transformation that caught fire with the arrival of their class. And in the summer after the fifth-place finish, something shifted with them — and the program.
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“It was also when we stopped calling ourselves underdogs,†Davis said. “After that summer, there was no more underdogs. It was just Mizzou gymnastics. We’re here to get stuff done.â€
MU will get to test that mentality as a well-known program, No. 3 LSU, visits the Hearnes Center on Friday. Given the momentum around Missouri and the celebrity status of its opponent, there’s a chance of a record-breaking crowd in the forecast.
If that sounds like pressure, it isn’t showing among the juniors, sitting — and laughing, so much laughing — around a table in the team’s lounge between meet days.
“We didn’t really have an expectation (at the beginning of our careers),†Davis said. “We were just going out there and having fun, whereas now we have the expectation to also score well while doing it and having fun.â€
Mizzou has come in as high as No. 3 in national rankings this season — gymnastics rankings are based on a rolling average of meet scores, not coach or media polling — and already has a Southeastern Conference road win over No. 20 Georgia.
Individually, the juniors are stepping up when called upon. After competing on vault, bars and floor last season, Celestine posted a 9.875 in her first collegiate beam routine at the start of this year. Davis matched her career high on beam with a 9.9 in the same meet. Kratzer produced a 9.875 on floor on the road against No. 4 Alabama. And Moore, who dropped a perfect 10 on vault last season, has already landed a 9.975 on floor this season.
And yet some of them seem almost surprised by the success they’ve found at the collegiate level. Davis and Kratzer both recovered from injuries on the back end of their high school careers, leading to limited senior years ahead of enrolling at MU. That never dissuaded coach Shannon Welker, who hails from Webster Groves and has led the Tigers since 2014, from believing in his core athletes.
“The coaching staff definitely saw something in me that I felt like was kind of lost,†Kratzer said. “So I was like, if they’re going to take a chance on me, I’m going to go for it.â€
Welker drew the current crop of juniors to Columbia from across the country. Davis and Kratzer grew up in Alabama and Georgia, respectively. Moore is from New Jersey, while Celestine is from Southern California — a bit of coast-to-coast recruiting pulled off during the pandemic.
“I saw a family in the program, and that’s all I was looking for in a university,†Celestine said. “It was not about how good they were. It was not about the ranking that they had because at the end of the day, the ranking’s just a ranking. It doesn’t really describe how that team actually is.â€
Hailing from different corners of the country and left without many real-life things to do, the recruiting class bonded over FaceTime calls and “Zou Zooms†before beginning to train and compete together on campus.
Their collective friendship has helped them continue to improve alongside the rest of the Missouri program — which Welker highlighted as the juniors’ vital contribution.
“Sometimes, it’s easy for very talented athletes that come from high school to college and then just kind of stay the same. And if you’re staying the same, you’re getting worse because other people are getting better,†Welker said. “I feel like part of our culture, too, is — listen, every year, the expectation is that you get better. You have to get better, and they’ve really embraced that and continued to find ways to become better competitors and better skill level and all those things.â€
That culture is coming together for Mizzou, and putting faith in the Tigers’ gymnasts seems like a key reason why.
“When someone can see a potential in you that you don’t see in yourself, you can go a long way because they can drive you even when you can’t drive yourself,†Moore said. “And I think seeing that potential that Shannon had in his head and him putting that not only toward me but toward the team, I saw that there was going to be a future here that wasn’t in the making right now but was going to get in the making. As we’ve been here, I’ve seen it happen.â€