In Jade Carey’s final meet, can she win the NCAA all-around title?
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In Jade Carey’s final meet, can she win the NCAA all-around title?

Metro Health News
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Apr 17, 2025, 10:02 AM ET

JADE CAREY WAS 14 when she verbally committed to compete at Oregon State.

She was enamored with the team and the coaching staff, as well as the Corvallis campus. It felt like the perfect fit.

In the nearly 11 years since, Carey has become one of the country’s most decorated elite gymnasts, with three Olympic medals and three world championship titles, but her love for Oregon State has never wavered. While the balancing act between her national team commitments, academics and NCAA gymnastics has been a challenge at times, Carey wouldn’t change a thing.

On Thursday, after a stellar collegiate career, the 24-year-old Carey will represent Oregon State for the last time at the NCAA championships in Fort Worth, Texas. She enters the competition ranked No. 1 in the country in the all-around and on balance beam, and will have one last chance to bring an NCAA title back to Corvallis.

“That would mean everything to me,” Carey told ESPN on Friday. “It’s been one of my biggest goals for a really long time, and it would just continue to build on the legacy of amazing gymnasts that we’ve had here. I’ve had such a career here at Oregon State, so it’s really exciting to be able to go to nationals one last time and just really give it my all.

“No regrets. Leave it all out there and see where it all falls.”

THAT “NO REGRETS” MANTRA has been a theme for Carey throughout her gymnastics career.

When Carey originally decided she wanted to come to Oregon State, she wasn’t Jade Carey, the Olympic gold medalist, or even Jade Carey, the Olympic prospect, she was simply a talented young level 10 gymnast. While many of her eventual Olympic teammates were training at national team camps in their preteens, Carey wasn’t even on the elite radar at that point.

When she was looking at colleges, she wasn’t thinking about how the Olympics would factor into her timeline or how she could manage both. She was just excited to compete at the Division I level.

But after the 2016 Olympics, the U.S. team was looking to replenish its depth on floor and vault in the temporary absence of Simone Biles. Carey’s skills on both events caught the attention of officials, and she was invited to a national team camp.

Her life almost immediately changed course. And suddenly she had some new dreams for herself.

In July of 2017, she won both floor and vault at the U.S. Classic, then went on to win vault and place second on floor at her first U.S. nationals. She was named to the team for the world championships later that year. It was just her third elite competition, yet she won silver in both events at worlds. Carey had originally planned on starting at Oregon State in the fall of 2018, but after her auspicious debut on the world stage, college would have to wait.

The rest of Carey’s meteoric rise is well-documented. Through a short-lived rule change, Carey qualified for the 2020 Olympics as an individual. At the pandemic-delayed Games, Carey competed in the all-around competition after Biles withdrew and finished in eighth place. She won the gold medal on floor.

And that fall, Carey, now a household name, finally arrived on campus at Oregon State — three years after she originally planned.

While there have been Olympians who have gone on to compete collegiately, including several of Carey’s peers from Team USA, most have gone on to traditional perennial powers like UCLA, Utah and Florida. Carey’s arrival in Corvallis was eagerly anticipated, and there was hope she could help bring Oregon State from outside contender to legitimate title threat. The team had last made the NCAA championships in 2019 and hadn’t advanced to the final since 1993.

Her impact on the team was immediate. She competed on all four events in her debut meet and won the all-around title. By the end of the season, she was named the Pac-12’s Gymnast and Freshman of the Year and was the 2022 NCAA runner-up on bars. She took a short break, then returned to elite competition that summer. In fall of 2022, she was back on the U.S. team for the world championships and won the vault title.

Carey continued to balance both for the next two years. She was an NCAA runner-up on three other occasions (2024 all-around and floor, 2023 beam) and won a slew of Pac-12 titles and awards. While other elite stars, like her 2020 and 2024 teammate Jordan Chiles, took the year off from NCAA competition for the Olympic lead-up, Carey stuck with both. Her strategy worked. She made her second Olympic team in 2024, helping lift the U.S. team to gold and winning the bronze medal on vault.

Though Carey made her double life look easy, it was anything but. She would spend hours in the gym after her morning practice with the Beavers working on her elite skills with her dad Brian, her lifelong coach and now an assistant for Oregon State. Sometimes a few of her teammates would stay with her for support — something she continues to be grateful for — but other times, she was alone. It was isolating and intense. Much of the rest of her time was spent on schoolwork.

“I think my first three years in college were great and I wouldn’t trade them for the world, but the extra weight with elite was a lot,” Carey said.

After participating in the Gold Over America Tour following her success in Paris, Carey returned to Corvallis in November for her senior year. And for the first time, she has been able to simply be a college gymnast, just like she initially had planned when she committed all those years ago.

The result has been one of the most dominant and impressive seasons in NCAA history. Carey has won the all-around title in every meet this season, earned four perfect 10.0 scores and become just the fourth gymnast to achieve her second career GymSlam (a 10.0 on every event). On Senior Night, she earned a career-best and the highest score in the nation this season with a 39.925, in front of a record crowd of 9,042 fans. It was the fourth-highest score in NCAA history. On Wednesday, Carey was given the 2025 AAI Award, an honor presented to the nation’s top senior gymnast.

“If she had been part of [teams that had won or contended for NCAA championships], she might go down in history as one of the greatest women’s collegiate gymnasts to have ever lived,” said ESPN analyst and three-time men’s NCAA all-around champion John Roethlisberger. “She is unique athletically and mentally. She seems unfazed. You never look at her and go, ‘Man, she’s choking.’ Has anybody ever said Jade Carey is choking? She just doesn’t do that. She is just this, a compliment, like this gymnastics machine. She’s something unique and special that I think differentiates herself from really anybody we’ve seen.”

Carey credits her 2025 success to being able to focus exclusively on college gymnastics. Without elite gymnastics to juggle, she’s also been able to spend more time with her teammates, in and out of the gym, and have actual free time. Carey went Instagram official with her girlfriend Aimee Sinacola in March, writing “Happy” alongside a carousel of pictures of the two together.

“This year I haven’t had the Olympics in the back of my mind 24-7,” Carey said. “I’ve just been able to think about and enjoy the whole process and the season. I was able to give more to college gymnastics and to my teammates than I’ve ever been able to do before. I think that’s really what’s ultimately led me to where I am this year and allowed me to have a lot of fun.”

WINNING AN NCAA all-around title wasn’t Carey’s only goal this season.

She had desperately wanted to go to the NCAA championships and contend for the team title. It was something they worked toward all season and something Carey had never been able to experience during her time at Oregon State. But at the NCAA regional finals, the last stop before Fort Worth, the Beavers finished in fourth place and were eliminated. Carey, the only member of the team to qualify as an individual, was disappointed. But the loss gave her purpose.

“I just wanted to give everything I had at the regional final and leave it all out there and really push for our best chance for the team to get there,” Carey said. “I was reminding the team after not to hang their heads about the season because it was really incredible overall. I know that nationals was a big goal, but [they should] still be proud of what they were able to do this year. And so really for me, just going into nationals, taking that all and finishing out the year, not only for myself but the entire team. It’s bigger than just me.”

While technically Carey will be alone in Fort Worth, in actuality she’ll be anything but. In addition to her Oregon State coaches who will be on the floor with her, her teammates Sophia Esposito, Mia Heather and Ellie Weaver will be in the stands cheering her on, alongside her family members and other friends. Carey was touched when they told her they were coming.

“I know that I’ll feel right at home just by looking up in the stands and seeing those three up there in their Beaver gear cheering me on,” she said. “It’ll feel really nice to have them there and know I can just look up to them and that they’ll take away all the nerves or the scary feelings and make me feel like I am right here at home.”

She will also be rotating with LSU, the defending champions, competing at the end of their lineups on each event. Calling the Tigers a “fun group,” she said she was excited when she heard she would be spending the competition with them and knew they would help bring out her best gymnastics. Haleigh Bryant, who won the all-around title in 2024, and Lexi Zeiss, a teammate of Carey’s on the 2022 worlds team, were quick to reach out and welcome her.

But, no matter how supportive everyone is, winning the all-around title as an individual won’t be easy. In fact, just two other gymnasts in history have done it — and no one has achieved the feat since Kentucky’s Jenny Hansen 30 years ago in 1995. But Aly Raisman, a six-time Olympic medalist-turned-ESPN analyst, believes Carey is in a unique position to join that list.

“It’s very hard to go from, I imagine, competing with your team all the time and then having to be there by yourself, but I think for Jade, what helps her a lot is she’s used to being out there alone as an elite athlete,” Raisman said last week. “She’s used to competing internationally by herself as well.”

Ranked in the top four on beam, floor and bars — ironically, vault has been her weakest event this year and she’s ranked No. 16 — Carey has a chance for multiple titles. If she were to win a title, she would become the first Oregon State gymnast since 1993 to do so and just the fifth in the school’s history. No one from the program has ever won the all-around.

Carey doesn’t know what her future holds beyond Thursday. She is not sure if she will return to elite competition and make a push for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles or retire. She’s excited to have a break once the season is over and take a summer vacation for the first time in a long time. She’s not sure where she wants to go — she just knows it needs to be somewhere that requires little advance planning and provides ample opportunity to relax, spend time with the people she cares about and, most importantly, “not think about gymnastics.”

She has taken a reduced course load at various points throughout her college career, so is slightly behind on her track to graduation, but thinks she will need about two more semesters to complete her degree in digital communications. She thinks she wants to do something in sports following her gymnastics career, whenever that officially comes to an end, but she’s not sure exactly what.

Right now, Carey isn’t allowing herself to think past Thursday and is solely focused on completing the journey she started as a 14-year-old. She admits that wide-eyed version of her was slightly naive when picking a college and completely unaware of the path ahead, but if she could go back in time, she would tell her teenage self that the best was yet to come.

“I would say so much, probably starting with, ‘You’re going to experience gymnastics as the most fun it’s ever been in your whole life,'” Carey said. “Like, ‘You thought gymnastics was fun when you were 8 years old, but it’s even more fun in college.’ It’s really cool to say that because it’s not always like that in life. To be able to get that joy that you had when you were a little kid age and on such a different stage is really special to me.

“And I would talk about all the experiences and life lessons that I’ve learned in these four years of my life. Being a student-athlete teaches you so much about discipline and how to persevere and get through the hard times and how to lean on each other as teammates and create bonds that you’ll have for the rest of your life. This really has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me that I’ll always be grateful for.”





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