Due to her consistency, Haleigh Bryant of LSU is currently the reigning collegiate gymnastics champion.
The morning of every LSU gymnastics meet, Haleigh Bryant has the same exact coffee drink to start her day: a Starbucks iced brown sugar oatmilk espresso. Shaken, not stirred.
Superstition?
“I’d like to say no,” Bryant said. “I like to call it consistency.”
Every great athlete possesses great athleticism. In that respect, Bryant is no different.
But what has set her apart as the best current female collegiate gymnast — and the best ever at LSU, and one of the greatest athletes to ever compete at her school in any sport — is her consistency of effort. Her ability to repeat, at an exceptionally high level, the skills and routines that she has honed over 20 years of gymnastics. The ability to compartmentalize and focus on the myriad aspects of life that now demand the time of high-profile collegiate athletes in the NIL era.
“She’s up in the morning at 7:30 to get her coffee,” said Trisha Bryant, Haleigh’s mom. “Then she’s going to get her work down. She’s got a schedule written out. She’s so organized, it’s incredible. I’m like, ‘Who are you and where did you get that?’ ”
But Bryant is more than her timetable. More than a tumble, a flip, the dance choreography woven into her virtually incomparable floor exercise routine.
For all of teammate Olivia Dunne’s social media superstardom or teammate Aleah Finnegan’s turn on gymnastics’ biggest stage at the 2024 Paris Olympics, it is Bryant who is the face of LSU’s program. She is the leader, and consequently, the one who always has to be “on.”
She never seems to waver, despite the minor elbow injury currently sidelining.
If Haleigh Bryant has a bad day, her mother said she’s not letting anyone see it.
“She’s not perfect,” Trisha Bryant said. “She does have bad days.”
“But she doesn’t want to let anyone down,” her father, Terry Bryant, said.
First feet forward
Like many in her sport, Haleigh Bryant can’t remember not doing gymnastics.
The sport wasn’t part of the Bryant family DNA. Trisha Bryant was a softball player at UNC-Charlotte. Terry Bryant, who grew up in Alabama, was a multisport high school athlete.
One night when the Bryants were headed out to dinner, they brought 3-year-old Haleigh to a parents’ night out program at a local gymnastics facility near their home in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area. When they returned, the gymnastics coaches there had some surprising advice.
“They said, ‘Your daughter has got some skills,’ ” Terry Bryant said. “Just bring her in.”
“We thought, ‘She’s 3, they just want our money,’ ” Trisha Bryant said. “It’s hard not to be a little cynical, you know?”
The folks who ran the gym were serious, as serious as Haleigh’s aptitude for gymnastics. She rose quickly through the junior ranks, to the point where she began being heavily recruited by the eighth grade.
She was interested in longtime powerhouse Georgia, but LSU quickly became her one true love. When Bryant made her official visit in September 2015, she committed immediately and scratched a trip to Alabama scheduled two weeks later.
There was just one snag: Bryant almost exclusively flipped forward in all of her routines, not backward, a potential red flag to college coaches.
“I knew when she committed on her visit here that she didn’t go backwards,” said LSU coach Jay Clark, then the lead assistant to legendary coach D-D Breaux. “But I didn’t tell D-D that. I felt like it would either correct itself or time would tell. I just didn’t think we could take a chance on missing on the potential of this kid.
“So, I let some time pass and then I finally told D-D that she doesn’t go backwards. D-D was like, ‘I’m not having that.’ And I said, ‘Well, you need to go see her and then tell me.’ So she went to North Carolina and comes back and goes, ‘You’re right. We need that kid.’ ”
After the fall
Bryant’s level of consistently high performances has become legendary. In 2024 she performed 62 routines, 56 of them (90.3%) with scores of 9.90 or better. Thirty-one of those, or half of her routines, were at 9.95 or better, including eight perfect 10s. She’s the only LSU gymnast with 10s in all four events — vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor.
Rarely, if ever, has Bryant had a stumble, though one from her freshman year still drives her.
It was Feb. 12, 2021. LSU was locked in a gymnastics version of a slugfest with No. 1 Florida and had the visiting Gators on the ropes with Bryant anchoring the Tigers on floor.
If Bryant got a 9.875, LSU would have sprung the upset. But she tripped and fell on her last tumbling pass, giving her a score of 9.425 and forcing the Tigers to count an earlier score of 9.75 from Christina Desiderio. Florida won 198.150-198.050.
“I was thinking I basically lost the meet for the team,” Bryant said. “That was really hard for me, especially as a freshman, having all that pressure on my shoulders going at the end of that lineup.
“But Jay and the coaching staff and my teammates were always so supportive. They were like, ‘We win together and we lose together.’ But it was really hard to get over because I felt like I let everybody down. Letting the team down, letting the coaches down, letting the fans down.
“But at the end of the day, you couldn’t change what happened. So I feel like that’s what I hung on to. I went back into the gym and fixed the element that I messed up.”
Bryant never looked back. She won the Southeastern Conference and NCAA vault titles that season, earned six All-American honors and was named the Central Region Gymnast of the Year.
Forming a 1-2 punch with Kiya Johnson that season and in 2022, Bryant basically carried LSU to the NCAA championships in 2023 after Johnson suffered an early season Achilles injury. Johnson returned in 2024 to help LSU to its first-ever NCAA title, with Bryant winning the NCAA and SEC individual all-around titles and earning the top two awards in women’s gymnastics: the Honda Award and the AAI Award.
The path back
Johnson decided to go out on top instead of returning for a sixth so-called “COVID” season in 2025. Bryant wrestled with what to do herself. She turned 23 just before Christmas, an age where the tug of life’s next chapter pulls hard.
A little over a week after LSU returned home with that first-ever NCAA trophy, Bryant made her decision public in a video produced by LSU.
“I am back for Year Five,” she said looking into the camera, flashing a quick smile and a thumbs up.
“It was like, ‘Do I want to start my life and kind of see what my life is outside of gymnastics?’ ” Bryant said. “It’s been my life for 20 years now. But I didn’t want to look back when I’m 30 and be like, ‘I wish I would have done one more year at my favorite university.’ ”
Bryant’s success in the NIL space now allowed for athletes — she recently designed her own leotard as part of a deal with Champion — made it an easier decision to put off the start of a career for at least another year. She plans to go into coaching.
“When I talked to my parents about it, I was thinking that it will be there after all of my years if it’s really meant to be,” Bryant said. “That’s why I kind of sat down with my agent as well, and she was like, ‘I think it’s not going to hurt. It’s obviously going to just help.’ ”
Clark and the rest of the LSU coaches were naturally thrilled to have back the gymnast whom freshman Kailin Chio referred to after Friday night’s opener with Iowa State as “the G.O.A.T.” — LSU’s greatest of all time.
“As far as I’m concerned, in the 12 years that I’ve been here, yes, she’s the best,” Clark said.
Greatness doesn’t confer invincibility, however. Bryant injured the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) in her elbow vaulting in LSU’s Gymnastics 101 exhibition meet in December, forcing her to sit against Iowa State.
Clark said Bryant’s injury isn’t season-ending, but in Friday’s post-meet news conference he still didn’t have a timetable for her return.
“You’ve got to be very, very careful with those things because, if you have a UCL go, that’s Tommy John surgery,” Clark said. “It’s a long way to March and April. We’re not trying to win a championship in January.”
The only thing in jeopardy at this point is Bryant’s assault on the NCAA and LSU record books. With 94 individual wins, she is 20 behind the school record held by Ashleigh Clare-Kearney Thigpen. That could still be within her grasp, but the all-time NCAA record of 28 perfect 10s (Bryant has 18) could already be much tougher to reach.
Whenever Bryant returns, expect the same consistent effort, the same routine. As she likes to say, her normal is good enough.
Good enough to be LSU’s best ever.
The Haleigh Bryant file
Age: 23 (Born Dec. 20, 2001)
NCAA titles: 2 (2021 vault, 2024 all-around)
SEC titles: 3 (2021 vault, 2024 all-around, 2024 vault)
Career individual titles: 94
Career perfect 10s: 18
All-American awards: 27
Other major honors: 2021 Central Region gymnast of the year, 2023 Central Region gymnast of the year, 2023 Honda Award finalist, 2024 SEC gymnast of the year, 2024 Central Region gymnast of the year, 2024 AAI Award winner, 2024 Honda Award finalist
