The Nebraska Cornhuskers men's gymnastics team competes as part of NCAA Division I, representing the University of NebraskaâÂÂLincoln in the Big Ten Conference. NU is one of just twelve Division I universities that sponsors a men's gymnastics program. Nebraska has hosted meets at the Bob Devaney Sports Center since 1976.
Since being established in 1939, the program has won eight national championships, finished as the national runner-up seven times, and won forty-two NCAA event titles. The bulk of this success came under longtime head coach Francis Allen, a former All-American who led the program for forty seasons. Twelve Cornhuskers have participated in the Olympic Games and combined to win four gold medals. The team has been coached by Chuck Chmelka since 2010.
Nebraska played its early years at the NU Coliseum before moving to the NU Sports Complex (now the Bob Devaney Sports Center) upon its completion in 1976. When Nebraska's basketball programs moved to the newly constructed West Haymarket Arena (known as Pinnacle Bank Arena for sponsorship purposes) in 2013, the Devaney Center underwent a $20-million remodel to reconfigure and shrink its main arena.
Nebraska opened the Francis Allen Training Complex in 2020 to house its men's and women's gymnastics programs; at 46,000 square feet it is among the largest gymnastics practice facilities in the country.
Ten Nebraska gymnasts and two coaches have combined to compete in sixteen Summer Olympiads, with nine representing the United States and one representing Canada. Francis Allen, Phil Cahoy, Larry Gerard, and Jim Hartung were a part of the U. S.-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and did not participate in any events. Four years later, Hartung and two other NU gymnasts, Jim Mikus and Scott Johnson, won the team all-around gold medal in Los Angeles. Trent Dimas won Nebraska's only individual gymnastics gold medal on the horizontal bar in Barcelona in 1992; it was the second American gymnastics gold medal in an Olympiad held outside the United States.