When a team as steeped in tradition and as used to winning as the Gym Dogs fail to advance to Nationals, the usual questions begin to come to the foreground.

Jay Clark said his Gym Dog squad will learn from the mistakes made this season. Photo by Ashley Strickland

The fans, so used to winning, expect national titles. They expect unblemished seasons. Failure is unacceptable, and not advancing to Nationals is a disgrace.

How could this happen?, they might ask. They want answers and accountability.

Unfortunately, Georgia head coach Jay Clark doesn’t have the answers as to why this season took such a tailspin. But he doesn’t make excuses.

“There are all kind of things you can blame it on, but I don’t know if that’s even productive,” Clark said in his office. “It’s not acceptable to any of us. Not just our fans, not just to our administration, and it’s not acceptable to me that this team did not qualify for the national championships.”

The Gym Dogs were a changed team this season. Gone were what Clark called “the Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, the best one-two punch our sport has ever seen,” in the graduated Courtney Kupets and Tiffany Tolnay, respectively. To continue the analogy, gone too was the Phil Jackson of coaching in Suzanne Yoculan. But the expectations were still there, and if anything, they expanded.

Clark said he knew this team was “not going to run away and leave people behind,” but knew his team was strong enough to be considered for a title.

He was proud of how his team fought all season long, through injuries and perceptions from outside of Athens.

“They fought hard,” Clark said. “I will always be grateful to this team because these seniors were put in a tough spot. Not only coming out of winning five straight national championships — so the expectations on them were already going to be super-high — but their coach was gone and they never wavered.”

As an assistant, Clark’s relationships with the team was different in almost every conceivable way than as the head coach. He was able to be more of a friend or “big brother” to the team and serve as a buffer between the team and Yoculan. When Yoculan came down hard and heavy on her team, which she was known to do, it was Clark that helped ease the blow. Not anymore, as now it was Clark who had to “be the heavy.”

“I had to shift gears while still maintaining the relationships I had with them and they had to shift gears and that was tough,” he said.

The loss still stings for Clark and the Gym Dogs, but Clark said he believes it’s the only way to move forward.

“We are all disappointed and heartbroken for the program and these seniors that don’t get a do-over,” he said. “There’s a reason the rear-view mirror is smaller than the windshield, because what’s behind you isn’t as important as what’s ahead of you. We are going to move forward, but we aren’t going to be dismissive of the mistakes we made, and not let them happen again.”