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Yoichi Tomita’s 35 years as an elite competitor, coach and administrator include coaching posts to the USA Men’s Olympic gymnastics teams in 1988 and 2000, and serving as the 2004 USA Olympic team chairman. He was named the 1998 USA Gymnastics Coach of the Year.
Add Junior National, Senior National Champion, National Team members, as well as World Champion and Olympic competitors to his coaching resume. 

His Olympic pupils include twins Dan and Dennis Hayden –alternates to the 1984 team that won the men’s first team combined gold medal ever at the Los Angeles Games. Add five-time NCAA All-American Trent Wells, Yoichi’s own accomplished son, Yewki; and Kerri Strug, who stole our hearts during a humid fortnight in Atlanta for the 1996 Summer Games. In 1998, he was also named the USA Gymnastics Coach of the Year.
Yoichi was a top Japanese gymnast and high school champion who was recruited heavily by colleges in the USA. As a schoolboy he idolized the dominant Japanese men’s national teams of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. He left Japan in 1974 with $1,000 in his pocket and a dream to have a successful gymnastics career in America. After winning an NCAA championship at Long Beach State. Yoichi’s rise to the top of American coaching echelons began in the late 1970’s with the Junior National Boy’s Program in the late 1970’s. He became one of the first coaches to work in this newly-formed program and was influential in it’s early development. Yoichi moved to Tucson to coach young gymnasts at Gymnastics World, the gym he opened in 1982. 

Today Yoichi is the chairman of the Men’s Program Committee and the Vice-Chairman for Men on the USA Gymnastics Board of Directors (the USAG is the governing body for gymnastics in the USA).

 

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