National Collegiate Athletic Association

Latest News

« back to 2011 | Back to NCAA News Archive Index

Gymnastics advocate Aronson to retire

By Gary Brown
NCAA.org

Longtime Olympic sports advocate Richard Aronson is retiring as executive director of the College Gymnastics Association, which serves men’s gymnastics.

Aronson, who has led the College Gymnastics Association since 1994, has been involved with men’s gymnastics for more than 60 years. He has been an advocate for growing and protecting gymnastics and other Olympic sports during that time. In fact, he collaborated with USA Gymnastics, the Eastern College Athletic Conference and other coaches to get legislation adopted at the 1997 NCAA Convention that protects any National Collegiate or division championship in Olympic sports that otherwise might be subject to discontinuation under legislation requiring minimum sponsorship.

The College Gymnastics Association did not have an executive director before Aronson started.

“I made that name up in the back of a car,” Aronson said. “We were on our way to a meeting in late 1994 at a time when men’s gymnastics was in real jeopardy of being eliminated at the collegiate level. People were wondering how we could save the sport, and I told them to put me in charge and I’ll do something. So I gave myself that title, and it stuck.”

Three years later, men’s gymnastics and other Olympic sports got the championship protection they needed from the NCAA. Men’s gymnastics and men’s water polo had either fallen below or were perilously close to the minimum number of sponsoring schools. They got a reprieve through a moratorium adopted in 1995 on the discontinuation of National Collegiate championships. That moratorium was renewed a year later.

But the successful effort in 1997 to preserve Olympic sport championships was based on the sponsors’ belief that “the NCAA is an important contributor to the United States’ success in international athletics competition, and the discontinuation of NCAA championships in those sports would adversely affect American prospects for years to come.”

Aronson competed at Springfield College during the 1950-51 and the 1956-58 seasons as co-captain of the gymnastics team and was a participant in the 1957 NCAA championships. His college participation was sandwiched around four years of service in the Air Force during the Korean War.

Aronson went on to coach and teach at Massachusetts-Lowell from 1967 to his retirement in 1990. In all, Aronson spent 27 years coaching gymnastics, soccer and track at a private school, a high school and three colleges.

Aronson’s involvement in gymnastics beyond the collegiate level is extensive. As an international gymnastics representative and official, Aronson represented the coaches association at an international symposium in Switzerland and was team manager and judge at two Pan American Games. He also judged at the 1981 World Championships in Russia and at various NCAA regional and national championships.

He was selected to lead the judges onto the floor at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, a moment Aronson said he regards as being among his proudest. He was the chief scorer for the rings competition that year. Aronson also was on the judges panel at the 1984 Games, and he attended the Games in 1976, 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2008, as well.

Aronson is a member of the Springfield College Athletic Hall of Fame and the Eastern Judges Hall of Fame. The service award the CGA gives annually is called the “Richard M. Aronson Special Service Award,” which he received at one point. “It’s a bit strange receiving an award that bears your name,” he said.

“I’ll miss the ‘action’ and the ‘politics’ of collegiate sports,” Aronson said. “But I’m so proud of the fact that we took action in the 1990s. Several Olympic sports were in trouble then, and we saved them from being eliminated.”