Who was Georgia's gymnastics coach before 25-year veteran Suzanne Yoculan? The answer is Walton, but the story goes much deeper than that. In May of 1983, Walton, then the Gym Dogs' head coach, and Yoculan, then an instructor at Camp Woodward in Woodward, Pa., applied to be Nebraska's head women's gymnastics coach.
Walton got the job. Ed Isabelle, Yoculan's boss and, like Yoculan, a former Penn State gymnast, urged her to apply for the Georgia job.
"I said, 'No, one rejection is enough for me,' " Yoculan said, adding in a particularly telling quote: "I don't do well with rejection."
Isabelle didn't either. He put together a resume for Yoculan and applied for her, sending the resume to Liz Murphey, who was Georgia's women's athletics director.
"Liz Murphey called me on the phone and said, 'We've got your resume. We want to bring you down for a visit,' " Yoculan said. "I said, 'What resume? I didn't apply for this job.' "
Murphey convinced Yoculan to come for an interview.
"I made up my mind in five minutes," Yoculan said. "I felt there was a big opportunity here to do something different, something great."
On his way out of town, Walton told Yoculan she would never receive enough support in Athens to build a viable program. Four years later, Yoculan led the Gym Dogs to the first of their eight NCAA titles in the sport. Yoculan didn't let Walton forget he was wrong either.
"I said, 'What was that you told me four years ago?' " she said.
Walton was fired by Nebraska in 1993, but Yoculan still is going strong as she leads Georgia into this weekend's NCAA Championships at Stegeman Coliseum.
Her Gym Dogs are ranked No. 1 in the country and chasing their fourth consecutive NCAA title.
"I think she's extraordinary in what she's been able to build," athletics director Damon Evans said. "What she has done since day one is build a dynasty here, and she's done it in a great way."
The first year on the job, Yoculan told Greg Marsden, whose Utah Utes dominated collegiate gymnastics at the time, " 'Look out, we're coming after you,' and she was absolutely right. That's Suzanne right there. There is nobody more competitive than Suzanne," Marsden said.
Marsden's Utes are one of just two teams to beat Georgia this season.
"I love Suzanne because she's direct, she's honest, she's not always going to tell you what you want to hear," he said. "She's going to get herself in trouble every now and then."
When Evans was an assistant to former athletics director Vince Dooley, he was the chief administrator for the gymnastics team and dealt first hand with Yoculan's fierce championing of her program.
"Suzanne is not shy about (what she wants), and I think that's one of the qualities that makes her who she is," he said. "I consider Suzanne someone who is going to stand up for her program. She can challenge you. She is going to push you to the edge, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as it's done respectfully."
Along with Yoculan's eight national titles, she has 15 SEC crowns. The Gym Dogs are 764-114-6 under her leadership and have won either a conference or national title in 17 of her 24 seasons. In the past 22 seasons, they've finished lower than No. 3 in the nation just once.
Equally impressively as the hardware in the trophy case are the fans in the seats. Stegeman Coliseum will be packed to its rafters this weekend, and regular-season gymnastics meets typically outdraw men's basketball games at Georgia.
Yoculan made the Gym Dogs the first women's collegiate team in the country with a renewable season ticket plan, and the Ten-O booster club, which she founded, is the largest women's gymnastics booster club in the country.
"I think she is one of the people who is very, very responsible for helping gymnastics grow around this country and gain so much visibility," Evans said.
Yoculan is retiring after next season to spend more time with her children, who are out of college, and the man she alternately refers to as her "fiancŽ" or "husband," prominent UGA booster Don Leebern.
"I've always had a list of things I wanted to accomplish as a coach," she said. "It went from winning a championship and then filling the arena to writing a book to having a weekly TV show and the new facility. I don't have anything else on the list."
The state-of-the-art training facility that Georgia moved into this year bears Yoculan's name.
For Yoculan, this weekend is the real culmination of her career, she said. Next year she will begin phasing herself out, giving more and more responsibility to assistant Jay Clark, who will take over in her absence. For the first time in her career, both her parents and all three sisters will be at a meet, along with both children and Leebern.
"To me personally, I'm feeling like this is my last year," she said.
She is already starting to take up golf, although she's still missing the ball as much as she's hitting it. That won't be the case in three years, she promises.
"I'm going to be good," she said. "I'm not going do anything and not be good at it."
NCAA gymnastics championship
Where: Stegeman Coliseum, Athens.
When: Today through Saturday.
Format: Two six-team meets will be held today with the top three teams from each of those meets advancing to Friday night's national championship meet. Georgia will compete against Stanford, Utah, Michigan, UCLA and Denver in today's 7 p.m. meet, while Florida, LSU, Alabama, Oregon State, Oklahoma State and Arkansas will compete in a 1 p.m. meet. Friday's championship meet will begin at 6 p.m. The individual portion of the meet will begin Saturday at 6 p.m.
The Favorite: Georgia is the tournament's top seed and has some momentum coming off its first-place finish in the NCAA Northeast Regional, in which it had one of its two highest scores of the season. "We're peaking at the right time, so, yeah the logic of it all is, yes we're the favorites," head coach Suzanne Yoculan said. Utah and Michigan, the only teams to beat Georgia this season, and Florida and LSU also are considered contenders.
The Skinny: Georgia, the three-time defending national champion, has been ranked No. 1 for all but two weeks of the season. The Gym Dogs (21-2) are ranked first in the country on three of the sport's four events - uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise. Georgia's relative weakness is the vault, an apparatus on which it ranks fifth in the country. The Gym Dogs have done all this despite losing the nation's top gymnast, two-time NCAA all-around champion Courtney Kupets to a ruptured Achilles tendon midway through the season. In collegiate gymnastics, six athletes compete on each event and the top five scores count. Depth will be the key, Yoculan said. "It's going to be the team with the best fourth or fifth score that's going to win the championship," she said. This is the fourth time the championships have been held in Athens. The Gym Dogs won the first meet in Athens in 1989, then fifth in 1995 and second in 2001. Georgia is going for its ninth national title overall.
