Once every four years, the sport of gymnastics sees a huge increase of interest. After all, each and every night of Olympic gymnastics is broadcast in prime time. Many of the world’s most popular sports, like basketball, soccer and baseball, don’t even come close to that kind of Olympic coverage. Those sports are usually relegated to late night/early morning broadcasts, usually on alternative networks.

After the Olympics, gymnastics amazingly disappears from the radar screen, save for annual tape-delayed broadcasts of the U.S. Nationals and World Championships. Need further proof? Ask any gymnastics website owner about their Google Analytics traffic statistics. In the weeks leading up to the Olympics and during the Olympics, gymnastics websites see a dramatic spike in traffic. The world is interested! Afterward, there is a predictable dive in traffic.

The big challenge is making gymnastics more popular. How do we prolong the spike? The sport is popular, but it just can’t seem to achieve a sustained critical mass, especially men’s gymnastics. The sport is not like football, basketball and baseball, where events are seasonally scheduled on a weekly or daily basis. Thus gymnastics is not a sport for the athlete who is interested in immediate gratification. Gymnastics is a sport that requires a year-round daily commitment with relatively few opportunities throughout the year to allow the athletes to show their stuff in competition. It’s not uncommon for elite junior or elite gymnasts to be limited, due to injury or illness, to perhaps one or two meets in a season. If healthy and injury-free, they are lucky to compete maybe 6-8 times per year.

As Justin Spring says, “Gymnastics is a fantastic sport to help develop coordination and athleticism.” Not only that, the sport develops a strong work ethic that translates to all facets of life. It’s no wonder that the graduation rates for high school and collegiate gymnasts hover around 100%. Whether gymnasts make it to the Olympics or not is irrelevant, because the more important thing is that gymnastics helps them become successful in life, possibly more than the sports currently garnering top attention.

Spring goes on to say that “gymnastics is such a tough sport, it’s hard to get anyone to stay in it if they don’t want to. If we could make it more popular in the media, I think more kids would join. It is such a great sport though, because of the qualities it teaches the athletes.”

Indeed. Here’s a challenge for ESPN, Fox, NBC, and CBS. Why not help prop up the popularity of men’s gymnastics by televising the JO Nationals? In this venue, the sports fan could tune in and watch young male athletes (ages 12-18) do amazing things that they thought only Olympians could do. There are other great venues during the year as well, all over the world, but if we start with the biggest juniors’ national event in the USA, it would excite more of the sports-watching public.

The Little League World Series was recently broadcast worldwide to great fanfare. These young athletes are amazing to watch, but do not compare well to the major leaguers of their own sport, through no fault of their own. Not at all to denigrate the skills of these mostly pre-teen baseball players, but many of the boys competing in JO Nationals are nearly ready to stand up to Olympians in competition. Certainly they don’t yet have the strength and polish of Olympic gymnasts, but to untrained eyes, they stand up very well. We’ve got Level 9 gymnasts (ages 12-13) who do many Olympic-level skills. Only seven percent of all male gymnasts ever make it as far as Level 9. As for the older Level 10s, high school boys, well, Paul Hamm made the 2000 U.S. Olympic team one year after winning JO Nationals. Four years later he was the Olympic All-Around champion.

Fans enjoy watching the men perform these incredible feats. It remains up to the sports networks to learn how to capture the thrills of a grand scale men’s gymnastics meet in which six events are ongoing at once, and NBC did decently with their highlights in their Olympic prime time shows. For the general public, gymnastics is best taped and then edited for later viewing so that all the highlights (and lowlights) make it into the program.

Who will step forward to fight for men’s gymnastics? One of the world’s toughest sports, requiring more strength and focus than almost any other, needs only the exposure of a few more hours a year on television in order to reach the acclaim it deserves next to the other world sports. The media may be the message here. Which big names in men’s gymnastics will be pushing their friends in the media to see that this happens? Will you?

At the very least, do what these fine people have done and please sign the petition to save Men’s NCAA Gymnastics.

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