The ties between former Georgia gymnast Kim Arnold and first-year Gym Dogs head coach Jay Clark run deep.

Clark, a long-time Georgia assistant, considers Arnold, who will be inducted into Georgia’s Circle of Honor this weekend, his greatest recruiting victory.

Arnold and Clark’s wife, then Julie Ballard, were roommates when both were gymnasts at Georgia.

Arnold and her husband, a former Georgia baseball player, even own and operate the Athens gym that Clark used to run.

“It always means a lot [to have a gymnast enter the Circle of Honor], but with Kim it’s a little extra special,” Clark said.

Arnold went on to be a back-to-back Honda Award winner, one of only two in the history of the award (the other is Georgia’s Courtney Kupets). From 1995-98, Arnold was a 12-time All-American and three-time individual NCAA champion.

Typical Georgia recruiting trends say that Arnold, an Oregon native living in Arizona, shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

“It’s unusual for us to go west of the Mississippi,” Clark said. “We usually won’t go that far west unless there’s an angle, a connection to somebody. But I was just na’ve enough to believe that we could go get anybody we wanted, when we wanted.”

That year, Arnold was the No. 2 recruit in the country behind Olympic champion Dominique Dawes. And Clark landed her, starting a whole new life for her.

“She was so easy to coach,” Clark said. “She came in and struggled as a freshman, showed up not in the condition she would have liked to been in . She probably went through a lot of homesickness and culture shock too. But as a senior she was better than when we got her as a freshman, which is rare in our sport.”

Arnold will be the fifth Georgia gymnast inducted into the Circle of Honor.