Marci Jenkins still remembers sitting on a stack of gymnastics equipment in the back of a pickup, shlepping equipment cross-campus from the University of Denver program’s former practice facility to the old Gates Field House.
At that time in the 1990s, then-head coach Dan Garcia had put DU gymnastics on the map, guiding the Pioneers to a pair of Division II national titles in 1982 and ’83 and then ushering the program into Division I in ’84.
But when Garcia retired in 1998, DU needed someone new to elevate the program in all aspects as a small, private school competing at the sport’s highest collegiate level. Like Jenkins’ ride across campus with fellow teammates, coaches and DU fraternity members helping to move the program’s then lone set of equipment, the Pioneers were in a period of transition.
Enter, Melissa Kutcher-Rinehart.
“I still have a visual of me and (another gymnast) sitting on top of three layers of equipment in the back of a pickup,” Jenkins, who graduated in 1994 and has served as a TV commentator for the program for several decades, recalled with a laugh.
“And that’s what Melissa took the program from — a program that had had success, but was then very much trying to find its identity and footing in Division I. She came in and set the program on the path to the standard that it’s at today.”
Where the the Pioneers are today is in the upper-echelon of Division I. Cecilia Cooley of DU works on the uneven bars during practice on the school’s campus on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
With Kutcher-Rinehart’s 28th year as head coach beginning on Sunday against Stanford at Magness Arena, the Pioneers have finished ranked in the Top 15 in Division I for 11 consecutive seasons. DU has had two individual national champions (Nina McGee in 2016 and Lynnzee Brown in ’19, both on floor), made 26 consecutive appearances at NCAA Regionals and six total NCAA National Championship appearances, and finished a program-best fourth in the nation in 2019.
Kutcher-Rinehart describes her program, which has competed as an affiliate member of the Big 12 since 2016 and won the conference crown in 2021, as “the little engine that could” considering that DU’s success comes against universities several times its size.
Under Kutcher-Rinehart, DU gymnastics has become one of the golden spokes in DU’s overall athletic dominance that’s netted the Pioneers 35 national championships. The Pioneers have been historically successful in hockey, skiing and men’s lacrosse, while the women’s lacrosse and soccer programs have also helped DU finish as the top-ranked Division I-AAA school in the Learfield Directors’ Cup Standings 16 of the last 17 years.
“I’ll never forget walking through the door on our first official day of practice and being like, ‘We have something to work with here,'” Kutcher-Rinehart said. “… Yes, we’re not going to have some of the resources that other institutions have. We don’t have football, we don’t get that television revenue from football.
“But I’ve always said, we have an opportunity in Denver gymnastics to show anything is possible, even if we’re not recruiting the same (star of) athletes as the rest of the Big 12 is, as the SEC is.”
Finding uncut gems
Kiley Rorich of DU preps her hands before hitting the uneven bars during practice on the school’s campus on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)Kutcher-Rinehart’s recruiting niche has been finding academically-inclined gymnasts who value DU’s small class sizes and rigor. And the longtime coach, who competed at Florida from 1988-92 and came to DU after serving as an assistant at Michigan, has continually found recruiting success by finding skilled gymnasts that powerhouse programs overlook.
DU’s two individual national champions, McGee and Brown, fit that mold.
“With Brown, she wasn’t even really looking at doing gymnastics in college and (Kutcher-Rinehart and her staff) did a recruiting trip and saw her and were like, ‘Hey, you can do this,'” Jenkins said. “She’s able to recruit under-the-radar gymnasts, gymnasts who haven’t quite had their breakout or maybe are coming on late, and she just pulls out the best in them, even when others didn’t initially see the potential.”
McGee was a similar story, a self-described “underdog” coming out of high school. Like Brown coming back from multiple Achilles tears, McGee had to overcome a serious injury when she stepped on campus as a freshman and doctors discovered shin injuries that required a bilateral tibial insertion surgery.
It kept McGee out her freshman year, but she says Kutcher-Rinehart never lost faith in what the gymnast could do when healthy again.
“I hit my peak after I verbally committed to the University of Denver, so there were definitely some (major college) coaches with whispers and grumbles like, ‘Man, we wish we could have grabbed her,'” McGee said. “And when I had the surgery, there was no guarantee that I’d even be able to walk afterwards. So, Melissa took a chance on me with putting me into the lineup my sophomore year.”
Attendance explosion
With team and individual success, local interest in the Pioneers — one of only two college gymnastics programs in the state along with Air Force — has skyrocketed since Kutcher-Rinehart took the helm. Kiley Rorich of DU tumbles during practice on the school’s campus on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
Whereas Jenkins recalled crowds of a few hundred during DU’s meets in the early 1990s, last year, DU set a program record with an average of 4,781 fans across six home meets.
The Pioneers went from hosting meets at the old Gates Field House (which was where the current gymnastics practice facility sits), to Hamilton Gymnasium, and then transitioned to hosting some meets at Magness Arena starting in 2015. In 2020, the arena became the program’s full-time venue.
For Kutcher-Rinehart, the move was a culmination of her efforts outside of coaching as she took on central roles in the program’s marketing, fundraising, ticket sales, and in-meet fan experience.
“When I first got here (a longtime registrar) would pick me up, and we would go to lunch together and brainstorm how to increase attendance,” Kutcher-Rinehart said. “I remember having conversations saying, ‘Could we have one meet in Magness Arena? Could we, over the years, have two meets in Magness? Could we increase to three competitions in Magness?’
“And before you knew it, Magness then ended up becoming our home.”
Meets at Magness have a party-like atmosphere with coordinated cheers, claps, non-stop music and introductory pyrotechnics. DU even has a pair of “hype men”. Tom Green-Parrott and his husband Taylor are cape-wearing, longtime season ticket holders who elevate the energy at home meets and also travel to most of the road meets.
“We want our fans to be loud, be crazy and be a part of the experience,” Tom Green-Parrott said. “We’ve been focused on teaching our fans that the atmosphere should be like a football game. And every time we go to any university with a bigger (enrollment) and the capability to draw bigger crowds, we see what they’re doing, take it back to Denver and incorporate it into our own fan experience.”
The Pioneers’ grassroots movement to make the program a draw to the general public has been decades in the making, according to Angel Field, a senior associate athletic director who has been at DU since 2002. Especially over the last 15 years, interest has continued to swell. DU had 226 season ticket holders in 2012, the earliest year that data is available, but sold a program-best 1,409 season tickets in 2024. Mila Brusch and Kiley Rorich of DU joke as they stand with teammates during practice on the school’s campus on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
Early in the tenures of Kutcher-Rinehart and Field, the two gave away a lot of free tickets in an attempt to stoke interest.
“We believed if you just tried us one time, and you saw the athleticism, the power, the flexibility of these young women, then you would come back,” Field said. “That started to work, in conjunction with other (marketing efforts), the team continuing to succeed on a national stage and the recent explosion in popularity of women’s athletics and specifically gymnastics.”
Targeting local gymnastics clubs has always made sense, but the program expanded its reach to dance studios, CrossFit gyms, recreation programs, cheerleading teams and even the performing arts. DU also capitalized on the hype of Olympic years, bringing in big-name former Olympians such as Mary Lou Retton as ticketing draws. And the school honed in on elementary schools with programs that awarded students who demonstrated character in the classroom with free tickets to introduce them to the sport.
“From there, more and more people started buying tickets,” Field said. “And then once they started buying tickets, sponsors came along and said, ‘Hey, I want to be a part of this.’… And those trends really haven’t stopped.”
Relationship-driven success
As the force behind DU gymnastics’ rise to both local and national prominence, Kutcher-Rinehart is equal parts expressive, intense and motherly in her oversight of the program. She also knew how to develop key relationships on campus from the start of her tenure, including with former chancellor Daniel L. Ritchie and influential trustee Joy Burns.
Both of those DU heavyweights were in the room when Kutcher-Rinehart interviewed for the job, as were other program stakeholders including Jenkins, who was asked to weigh in on the hiring committee from the perspective of a former gymnast.
“We were at this point where we had great talent but we needed to get to that next level, and you could just tell that Melissa knew how to get there,” Jenkins said. “She got the job because it was clear she was already a good coach, but it was also a combination of her energy, her articulateness, and her ability to really speak to how she understood this program and what this program meant to DU.
“… The relationships that she had with Joy and Chancellor Ritchie were just so critical to this program’s success early on in her tenure. It’s about Melissa and the team she surrounds herself with, and that’s also been a big part of the program’s rise.”
Through relationships with those outside the program and the gymnasts within it, the coach has made the tenants of her team — teamwork, character and excellence — more than just a catchphrase. While she demands elite performance from her gymnasts in the gym, she’s also quick to offer support to her athletes outside of it, such as when Maddie Wadman and her husband lived in a spare bedroom at the coach’s house when the couple was waiting on their own home to be built.
“She’s willing to open her home and care for any of the girls that need it,” Wadman said. “And if someone has something that happened in their hometown, or needs extra support, she’ll literally jump on the plane and fly back home with you.
“She’s really like a mom away from home to every single girl on the team. In the gym, it’s all business all the time. But outside of the gym, she’s the most supportive and loving.”
Looking forward, Kutcher-Rinehart is counting on the culture she’s fostered to continue to carry DU gymnastics, even as the Pioneers face challenges in keeping up with a changed college athletics landscape in the wake of the House settlement.
While the new Division I gymnastics roster limit is 20 — thus allowing for 20 scholarships for fully-funded programs — DU only carries 14 on its roster. And while DU hired Peter Mannino as its assistant athletic director for Name, Image and Likeness last year, the NIL deals that Pioneer gymnasts have are smaller-scale.
DU opted into the revenue-sharing that comes with the House settlement, but Kutcher-Rinehart said that it remains a “work in progress” for any of that money to significantly affect her recruiting efforts. Kiley Rorich of DU stretches during practice on the school’s campus on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
All that considered, Kutcher-Rinehart views the challenge to keep up with the deep pockets of Utah, BYU and others in the Big 12, plus well-funded SEC schools such as Oklahoma and LSU, as “a fun opportunity.”
“Do I think that will get harder now to be in the Top 10 in the country, which is always my goal? Yes, of course I do,” Kutcher-Rinehart said. “But is that something that we’re capable of? Absolutely.”
After three Denver gymnasts advanced to the NCAA National Championships as individual qualifiers last year for the first time since 2004, the Pioneers will lean on three senior leaders in 2026 in Mila Brusch, Cecilia Cooley and Kiley Rorich. Plus, DU features six freshmen who comprised a Top 10 Division I recruiting class.
Even after graduating a bevy of talent from 2025, DU’s high expectations remain the same this season, starting with Sunday’s showdown against Stanford.
“I think that people are expecting that we won’t be as good as we were because we have a younger team,” Cecilia Cooley said. “But I think that’s going to be our strength this year — our new blood of our underclassmen, paired with the same ambition to keep the program where it’s been under Melissa.”
DU’s 2026 Home Schedule
All meets are at Magness Arena at the University of Denver’s Ritchie Center.
Sunday, Jan. 11, 1:45 p.m. — Stanford
Sunday, Feb. 1, 2:45 p.m. — Iowa State
Saturday, Feb. 14, 6:45 p.m. — Arizona
Sunday, March 1, 1:45 p.m. — Utah
Monday, March 9, 5:45 p.m. — Air Force
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