Flying high

A great floor routine starts with the music.

For Temple gymnast Kyrstin Johnson, that part was easy. She pulled the top three songs off her playlist — “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar, 310babii’s “soak city (do it),” and GloRilla’s “TGIF” — after a quick assist from her mother.

“I was just sitting in the truck with my dad and my mom one day, and GloRilla came on, and my mom was like, ‘This should be the third song. This is a perfect fit,’” Johnson said.

Floor routines have been the centerpiece of women’s artistic gymnastics for decades, but in NCAA gymnastics, they’ve taken on a life of their own as gymnasts bring more dance elements and personality to their routines.

One of the first athletes to bring the art of the college floor routine into the mainstream was UCLA’s Katelyn Ohashi, whom Johnson counts as one of her all-time favorites.

Ohashi competed at the elite level before going to college and first went viral for her joyful routines in 2018. During her NCAA career, Ohashi earned nine perfect-10 scores in the floor exercise, and videos of her routines regularly racked up millions of views on YouTube, including her 2019 routine, which has almost 250 million views.

“She really had in mind what I had in mind, which was to have something that she would enjoy doing, but also have the crowd in it as well,” Johnson said. “She was just dancing her heart out. That’s the same thing that I wanted to do when it came to my routine.”

But Ohashi is far from the only one. UCLA has become famous for its routines, including by two-time Olympian Jordan Chiles, Nia Dennis in 2021, Gracie Kramer in 2020, and Sophina DeJesus in 2014. Other gymnasts like Florida’s Trinity Thomas and LSU’s Lloimincia Hall also have gone viral.

Johnson is the latest gymnast to join that group, thanks to her collaboration with Temple junior and choreographer Cristina Elliott.

Johnson transferred to Temple in 2024 after starting her career at Talladega (Ala.) College, a historically Black college. When the gymnastics program at Talladega shut down, she searched for a place where she could still embrace her culture, and she found that at Temple.

“You can bring your HBCU anywhere you go; you can bring your culture wherever you go,” Johnson said. “I seriously just embrace that, and everyone has been open to it. Even though the whole program shut down, you can still carry everything that you had over to your next chapter, and that’s what I’m doing and showing in my floor routine.”

That started with her song choices, all by Black artists, but continued in her choreography.

You can bring your HBCU anywhere you go; you can bring your culture wherever you go. I seriously just embrace that, and everyone has been open to it.

For each routine, Elliott looks to play to a gymnast’s strengths and incorporate elements of who they are through the dance sections. In Johnson’s routine, that included Lamar’s “squabble up” dance move and hints toward HBCU band drills — and Johnson’s signature crown gesture toward the end.

“Some dancers are a little more — I don’t want to say stiff — but aren’t as well-versed when it comes to more groovy, hip-hop moves, so you have to make it a little more hard-hitting or fierce instead of groovy and more like into the music,” Elliott said. “But I knew Kyrstin. She came from an HBCU, and I watched some of her old routines, and she’s just a powerhouse and she has such great movement quality. I knew that I could make her routine a little more difficult and more stylized to her.”

Elliott’s choreographed portions of the routine include the sections between Johnson’s tumbling passes, which were just a few counts of eight each. In gymnastics, floor routine choreography needs to be simple enough to keep the gymnasts fresh for their tumbling passes but impactful enough to engage the crowd and the judges. That means using fewer moves but making them big and visible.

Johnson learned the routine in only 30 minutes and instantly fell in love.

But it’s not just her. Johnson’s teammates dance along with her from the sideline during the routine, and it has reached hundreds of thousands of fans on social media since the first time it was posted during an intrasquad scrimmage.

“When you see your teammates and coaches doing it, that’s how you know it’s actually a fire routine,” Johnson said. “I’m just glad that there’s other people enjoying it as much as I am. I’m happy to put a smile on other people’s faces and have them just want to dance to it. It makes me feel good and makes me hype in the routine as well during competitions. It’s empowering.”