Suzanne Yoculan’s ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ legacy with GymDogs lives on as she leaves role

Suzanne Yoculan felt cheated. She had a prime opportunity to escape from the strenuous demands of coaching club gymnastics. She was ready to begin a college coaching career at Nebraska, but she was passed over for a coach who had previous experience at Georgia.

Yoculan returned to the routine of training elite gymnasts at Woodward Camp in Pennsylvania ahead of the 1984 Olympic Games. Meanwhile, fellow club coach Ed Isabell thought Nebraska’s loss could be Georgia’s gain. Without Yoculan knowing, he shipped her resume and cover letter down south to Athens.

A few days later, Liz Murphey, Georgia’s assistant athletic director for women’s sports, called Yoculan.

“‘I’m not interested in that job,’” Yoculan told her. “‘I’m not interested in peanuts, Jimmy Carter or Confederate flags.’ I saw Georgia as the state you went through to go to Florida.”

Georgia needed a coach because its gymnastics program was on the verge of becoming defunct. Gender-equality mandates created by Title IX were the only reason it had a pulse, Yoculan said. Murphey was persistent, so Yoculan made the trip and found a match that would lead to the most-decorated era in program history.

Throughout her 26-year coaching career, Yoculan collected 10 NCAA national championships, five consecutive from 2005-09.

“Suzanne was one of those transformational coaches, and I don’t know whether that’ll be done again,” current Georgia athletic director Greg McGarity said. “Those are once-in-a-lifetime coaches who do that over time.”

Yoculan saw Athens as “home,” similar to her alma mater of Penn State with a small downtown area and a tight-knit community.

She wasn’t the best college gymnast, she said, although that’s not evident from her coaching career. Similarly, Georgia was far from prosperous at the time she took over, but a chance to build the program from its foundation appealed to Yoculan.

She also had control, and a lot of it.

“(Former Georgia athletic director Vince) Dooley wasn’t too excited about me being there or about gymnastics,” Yoculan said. “He sort of gave me a free reign to do what I wanted. I walked into the coliseum for the first time and envisioned us filling the arena. Everybody else thought I was half crazy, but I had to chip away at the vision.”

Thirty-six years later, the “GymDogs” often do fill Stegeman Coliseum as Georgia’s second-most popular team behind football, and Yoculan’s name is written in university lore. It’s hard to meander through the coliseum without seeing her accomplishments in the display cases.

Yoculan’s path to escalate Georgia gymnastics into the dynasty it has become, however, was far more tedious than noticed by the public eye.

Her team distributed fliers throughout campus parking lots to publicize meets. She once had to pull out gymnastics mats to intervene with Hugh Durham’s men’s basketball practice on the Stegeman floor because a meet was set to begin in a few hours. The administration gave her little help, Yoculan said, because gymnastics was ranked fifth — behind men’s and women’s basketball games and practices — on the coliseum’s priority list in the university handbook.

Since then, Georgia has come a long way from scraping for ticket sales. In 2019, the GymDogs averaged 10,092 fans and ranked fifth nationally in attendance.

It became more than gymnastics for Yoculan. She became a trailblazer for women’s sports. It wasn’t easy for a self-described, determined “Yankee” to endear herself to the South and have everything go her way. Fixing those inequalities, she said, made it worth it.

“She created the program, so there are so many things I took from her,” said current Georgia head coach Courtney Kupets Carter, who competed for Yoculan from 2006-09. “She never quits, has a strong mentality and always wants to push for more. That has been the biggest thing that I’ve taken from her.”

Yoculan won at least one national title in each decade of her career. But her most-memorable reward was the ascent in the mid-to-late 2000s. The competition for the national title was between Georgia and everybody else. Recruits lined up to be GymDogs. The team hoisted championship trophies year after year. Fans had a front-row seat to watch Kupets Carter — who could be considered the greatest college gymnast with nine individual NCAA titles as a 15-time All-American.

“It was almost magical and surreal,” Yoculan said. “I had people I believed in and the team responded to my system. We had a culture that ran itself with a highly-disciplined group of girls.”

In the years after her retirement in 2009, the results weren’t the same. Yoculan (now Yoculan Leebern) felt a need to return in 2017 as a volunteer assistant coach, when her former star athlete took the reins as Georgia’s head coach. A dynamic duo returned.

“We saw her walk in and we were all scared of her,” former Georgia gymnast Sydney Snead said. “I thought I was going to pee my pants, but she’s amazing and we all got close with her — after we were terrified, of course.”

After two seasons, she handed those duties to another former gymnast — Katie Heenan Dodson. Yoculan had a two-year timeline in her head when accepting the role, and now wanted to hang it up. Heenan Dodson won’t be as involved as a volunteer coach with four children, a job as an elementary school religion teacher and commuting from north Atlanta.

Yoculan Leebern takes more of a behind-the-scenes role, too. Her only known involvement with the GymDogs’ is a Ten-0 booster club in an effort to promote — many years later — and find ways to boost fan engagement inside Stegeman Coliseum. While Georgia started its 2020 season, she spent time with her husband, Don Leebern, in Rwanda.

“Katie will immediately hold the gymnasts to a high standard,” Yoculan Leebern said. “Katie and Courtney already know how each other acts. They’ll be on the same page in coaching the ‘GymDog way.’”

Georgia has a vision for titles yet again. The GymDogs felt the “old days” of program success after posting their first 198 score in the NCAA Athens Regional — finishing second to Oklahoma, then ending the season at eighth in the semifinals — since the last title in 2009.

For 36 years, she remained the coach others must go through to get to a national championship. Now, Yoculan Leebern allows a legacy to continue through new eyes.

“I didn’t ever know I was going to be a coach,” she said. “When doors open, you have to kick them in and take risks. There’s no dream too big.”

This story was originally published January 10, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Suzanne Yoculan’s ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ legacy with GymDogs lives on as she leaves role."