The 27-year history of women’s gymnastics at N.C. State there has been just one head coach — Mark Stevenson.

During his tenure, Stevenson has compiled a 389-221-1 record, and his teams have advanced to the postseason in 14 of the last 15 years. It is poised to do so again, as it is ranked No. 22 in the nation.

It’s a far cry from the early days when the only things that were less frequent and harder to come by than wins were scholarships.

It got so bad that once he was told by former interim athletic director Todd Turner that “I don’t expect you to win because we don’t give you anything to win with.”

Stevenson answered him, “Well, I expect to win, because that’s my job.”

And since then he has done just that — taking the program that he built from scratch and shaping it into one of the University’s most successful in recent years.

At that time the only pressure put on Stevenson to win was from within. And it still might be the case today, as he has proved his ability to win no matter what the circumstances or support might be.

Stevenson’s start in the sport

In high school, Stevenson ran track and was also a member of both swimming and diving — but gymnastics was the only thing that gave him the adrenaline rush he craved.

“When you let go of the high bar and flip twice and hope you don’t hit your head on the bar as you [are] going by it and still want to land on your feet, it gets your heart pumping,” Stevenson said. “And nothing else I did, for me, was anywhere close to that.”

Stevenson was a captain during his senior year on the men’s gymnastics team at Iowa and qualified for the NCAA Championships on the vault that same year.

Stevenson wanted to go to grad school, but once his father passed away that same year, his plans were forced to change.

“My assistant coach [at Iowa] set me up to go to UMass because he had gone there and knew the head coach there,” Stevenson said. “So I went to Massachusetts as a women’s [gymnastics] assistant, but really didn’t like the area that I was living in.”

The next year, the assistant coach’s twin brother moved to the Raleigh area and invited Stevenson to come to State to help out with the now-defunct men’s gymnastics team.

After former diving coach John Candler decided to no longer coach gymnastics, Stevenson was hired from his assistant position with the men’s program to be the head coach of the new women’s gymnastics team at age 24.

The rough beginning years

On the inaugural team, there were just eight gymnasts in all — and only three were on scholarship. The team competed against just a handful of teams because it wasn’t often scheduled by other schools.

Perhaps the best thing about the earliest years for Stevenson was that he, at the same time, was working towards his master’s in recreation resource administration at State.

“There’s not a lot of leeway as far as your time for studying during the season,” Stevenson said. “I did most of my class work in the fall and in the summers.”

He earned his master’s in 1984, and though before he felt unsure of his future in coaching, he stayed on as the head man.

After all, it was that year — with the team only its fourth year in existence — that the team finished in the top 20 in the country, won the first and only ACC Gymnastics Championship and posted a 15-6 record.

But just two weeks later, Stevenson said his program started toward what he called the “dark ages” as it fell to 19-44 over the next four years, including a dreadful 1-22 season.

“We went from six scholarships to none, and we stayed that way all the way through the [former Athletic Director Jim] Valvano era,” Stevenson said. “So right in the middle of recruiting, I got a call saying ‘Well, there’s no reason to be recruiting because you don’t have any spots.'”

When Carmichael Gymnasium’s seating could no longer accommodate the number of fans present for home meets, the team finally used Reynolds Coliseum — but was still forced to move all the equipment by itself.

“We put one meet there, and three hours before the meet, my team was carrying the spring floor piece by piece over there because we didn’t have any help to move it,” Stevenson said. “So it was a real interesting time for us.”

It was far more trying on the men’s side at the time. Valvano ended the men’s gymnastics program during the summer of 1986.

Stevenson hinted the ripple effect from the termination left a sour taste in all who were associated with either program, and in order to still have a job, the head coach for men became Stevenson’s assistant.

“We had a lot of kids on the men’s team at that point and they were very unhappy obviously,” Stevenson said. “Most of them didn’t go anywhere else. They just finished their degrees here, and honestly, because of the way it was done, we don’t hear from them often.”

The rise to national prominence

The team averaged a little more than six wins a year from 1985 to 1991, but since a 17-win 1992 season the program has taken a turn for the better and hasn’t looked back.

In 1993 came the first 20-win season in school history, and in the last 16 seasons, 12 of his teams have earned 20 or more wins, and in all but one the Pack has placed in regionals. His team has also posted as many as 29 wins in one year.

In 1998 the team finished 11th at the NCAA Championships, despite being somewhat shorthanded for the competition.

“That year we had eight scholarships total,” Stevenson said. “We were the only team in the top-12 that didn’t have 12 full-rides. I’m just extremely proud of the hard work and the ethic those teams put into being a better team.”

For years, Stevenson worked without any scholarships or fewer than what he has now. “Our recruiting philosophy was not to find the best gymnast, but the best athlete,” Stevenson said. “And get a real smart kid, because the smarter the kid, the easier it is to teach him something. And so we recruited the best athlete we could find with the finest GPA we could get.”

The turnaround job at State garnered him offers from elsewhere. Stevenson said he was offered head coaching jobs at both Denver and his alma mater Iowa.

But he turned both down because “it feels right at N.C. State.”

In order to jump from a consistent top-25 performer to the upper echelon of college gymnastics, Stevenson said he hasn’t changed what type of gymnast he recruits, but also didn’t want “to take four years for them to be really good.”

And Stevenson has scheduled what he has called the toughest schedule in school history.

This year’s team is just 10-9, with six of the losses coming against teams ranked higher, including the current No. 2, 3, and 7 teams in the country. No. 1 Florida is next on the schedule.

But it’s all part of taking his team to the next and higher level, according to Stevenson.

“We felt like it would only make us better,” Stevenson said. “If you compete against people that you know you can beat, you push as hard or you don’t try as hard or focus as much.”

After 27 years as head coach and turning down outside offers, Stevenson said he plans on sticking around in Raleigh as long as he thinks he is helping improve his gymnasts.

“[I’ll stay] as long as I feel I’m not doing a detriment to my team, as long as I feel my team is getting better and I’m giving something to them that’s getting them better,” Stevenson said.