Jayla Hang isn’t looking back: How the rising US gymnastics star found her footing after 2024 disappointment
By Scott Bregman - 29 April 2025
US gymnast
Jayla Hang isn’t letting last season’s setback define her.
Last summer, the rising star missed out on a trip to the US Olympic Team Trials.
This year, Hang has returned to competition more motivated, more mature and more focused.
“I’m definitely more confident in just knowing that I’m meant to be here,” Hang told Olympics.com. “What I work so hard for, it’s paying off in these smaller milestones – and it’s pushing me to take these accomplishments and use it for motivation to get to my higher goals.”
Those “small” milestones have included some big results, including a second-place finish in the all-around at the Winter Cup in mid-February and gold medals at the World Cups in Antalya, Turkey, and Osijek, Croatia.
Coach
Cale Robinson, who has guided Hang since 2019, says Hang’s stellar start to the season began at an early February national training camp where they competed twice in the all-around.
“We talked a lot about that [camp] being an opportunity to figure out how to handle stress and how to handle their work in a calm way,” said Robinson. “I just think she’s more in tune with the process of trying to get the end results rather than focused just on the end result.
“I see a different level of intention about how she approaches each turn and really buying into having cue words for every skill and affirmations that she believes in terms of what kind of energy she’s going to bring to each event,” he continued. “She’s created a process for herself, and I think she just carried that into the World Cup environments.”
Hang agrees – though it might not have been as easy as the 17-year-old makes it look.
“I’ve been really nervous getting back out there [in international competition],” she admits. “It still hasn’t gone away, the nerves, but definitely getting used to being able to control them a little bit more by learning to breathe a lot more, tell myself my affirmations and go into my cues. Honestly, try to not overthink it.
“[I have to] just trust my training,” Hang continued, “because I realized that if I do too much to prepare myself, it doesn’t help me in a sense. It gets me more anxious, so I’ve learned different techniques, and I think it’s helped me as I’ve gotten more experience.”
Jayla Hang: Channeling disappointment
The end of her first senior season in 2024 still looms large, a motivating factor in the early days of her 2025 campaign.
“Not making trials definitely wasn’t how I expected it to be,” says Hang. “But I feel like coming into this year, 2025, I’m a lot more motivated and I know what I need to do to get better in the gym. The motivation is a lot more than it was last year because it wasn’t how I expected it to be.”
Robinson also says the disappointment from last summer has brought things for his pupil into sharp focus.
“I think sometimes when you don’t get something that you want, you realize how bad you wanted it,” he said. “I think it was just a catalyst for a different level of maturity and approach in her everyday training, not getting frazzled by bad turns or bad days and letting them snowball.
“She’s really just taking control of her gymnastics, and she’s grown up a lot over the last year.”
Slow and steady for Hang
Her growth hasn’t been an overnight phenomenon.
No, she and Robinson have a plan, working to add skills only when they’re consistent and able to be executed well enough to make sense.
Hang is training the difficult Amanar vault, having posted a
recent training video on her Instagram. Whether or not we’ll see it this season remains to be determined.
“I hope so!” she says of the vault. “That’s the goal, but I don’t really know what’s going to happen because that vault is pretty hard for me, so it’s just based on consistency and how often I can actually get the vault to my feet.”
More international experience is part of the plan, too.
Next up, Hang will vie for a spot at June’s
Pan American Championships at an upcoming national team camp.
“We’re kind of on the ‘we’ll take any opportunity that comes our way’ bandwagon,” explains Robinson. “I think having so many opportunities this year has been really great for [her].”
And while the LA28 Olympics might loom large in the gymnastics world, Hang is content to live in the here and now – at least for a while.
“I don’t want to think about [the Olympics] until it happens,” she says.
It’s a mindset focused on building slowly – goal by goal, meet by meet, year by year.
“I have a lot of goals, and just mentally, I think I’m ready for this year,” Hang said. “I’ll push myself.”
