Suzanne Yoculan, arguably the greatest collegiate gymnastics coach ever, is gone.

Courtney Kupets, not-so-arguably the best NCAA gymnast of all-time, is too.

But Jay Clark, Yoculan’s long-time assistant, remains in Athens. And as Georgia’s Gym Dogs crawl deeper into their offseason preparations, Clark, in his first season as head coach, is helping continue the tradition of excellence that Georgia gymnastics has come to embody.

“His coaching style’s different, and the way he teaches is just different,” said senior Courtney McCool.

“But it’s just like having a different professor. We’ve had him before, and the freshmen have never had anyone else, so they know no different. It’s been a nice transition. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have a new coach that we don’t even know. I feel very, very blessed.”

After conditioning-intensive voluntary workouts (which McCool said “kicked [their] butts”), the Gym Dogs began mandatory workouts just under a month ago. Clark is their new coach, but the fact that he’s been around the program for 19 years now has ensured there’s been little change in the Gym Dogs’ own version of the Georgia way.

“That’s one of the biggest reasons it’s been such an easy ride,” said senior Grace Taylor.

“But make no mistake, we’ve been working really hard, and it’s not like gymnastics got easier … If anything more, we have more to prove than we have in a while.”

With a seemingly smooth coaching transition already underway, the biggest change you’ll see out of the Gym Dogs this season is the lack of a proven all-arounder.

Gone are Kupets and Tiffany Tolnay, who, in addition to claiming nine individual NCAA championships and 28 All-American titles between them, filled two all-around spots during their entire Georgia careers.

The Gym Dogs’ pair of big-name seniors for this season – Taylor and McCool – are three-event gymnasts. Neither perform on vault.

That leaves a number of younger gymnasts vying to fill the four-event voids left by Kupets and Tolnay.

“We’ve got all-arounders on our team, we just don’t have one that has won an all-around championship or anything like that at this point,” Clark said. “And so people don’t look at us as returning the big giant superstar. But we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve, I think.”

Those tricks will have to come from a number of different sources.

Clark, long the program’s recruiting mastermind, brought in all four of Georgia’s highly-touted freshmen (most notably Shayla Worley and Christa Tanella) as all-arounders, at least in nomenclature.

Cassidy McComb, a junior with some all-around experience last season, will be looking to bounce back from somewhat of a sophomore slump.

Sophomore Gina Nuccio experienced the full gambit of injuries in an ill-fated freshman campaign, from heart complications to sprained ankles. Her gymnastics have “come alive” this offseason, Clark said. Classmate Kat Ding has been “working hard” and training on all four events as well.

However it happens, Taylor said, it’s going to work out.

“It’s going to be OK,” she said. “You can’t ever replace a gymnast, you can’t ever replace Tiffany or Courtney, and that’s not what we have to do. We just have to come up with new names. Nobody will ever be as good, nobody will ever be the same. But we’re not trying to replace them. We’re just finding someone else.”

Going without a proven four-event star in its senior class (or junior class, or any class) is truly a unique situation for Georgia gymnastics this season.

But going without strong leadership, and a chance for yet another championship? Not going to happen.

“Leadership comes in different forms, and every year is different. We have the same intentions as every year,” said Taylor, glancing up at a championship poster that reads simply, “Oops! We did it again.”

And the Gym Dogs are trying to do it again in 2010, for the sixth time in a row. When they officially vault into their season Jan. 11 against arch rival Utah, they’ll be under new leadership – if only in name.

“Philosophically, things weren’t going to change,” Clark said. “We’ve been together so long that you can argue that the way we did things was as much [assistant coach] Doug [McAvinn] or Jay or Suzanne as it was anybody.”