Every sport is built on fundamentals — perhaps none more so than gymnastics, where the building blocks for the most intricate skills are put together early and solidified through practice after practice.
Danna Durante, who will begin her sixth season as the UNC gymnastics head coach this winter, knows that better than anybody. It’s why she conveyed her excitement for the upcoming season to 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck in May, and also why she presents each of her gymnasts with a challenge at the beginning of each campaign.
“We lay out some aspects that are really important if you’re gonna be a part of Carolina Gymnastics,” Durante told Keck. “One of them is hard work. One of them is being disciplined. One of them is finding joy through struggle and adversity. If you want to achieve “fill in the blank,” you need to be able to find joy through that struggle. Because nothing is just, ‘Oh, I’ve got it!’”
Durante found joy in the struggle in 2021, when she was named UNC’s head coach. The Tar Heels had not reached the NCAA regionals since 2017, but Durante guided them there in her very first season. They got back to the postseason in 2023, 2025 and 2026, and this past spring fell less than half a point short of advancing to the regional finals. Those are the razor-thin margins which define gymnastics.
“Other sports, they could care less about form,” Durante said. “It’s like, “Did the ball get in the hoop? Did the ball get in the goal?’ Very, very different in what we do. Because it’s not just the skills that they’re doing, but it’s actually how they’re performed.”
The 2026 season marked UNC’s best performance in an NCAA Regional in Durante’s tenure in Chapel Hill. And that foundation, plus the returns of standout performers like JoJo Valahovic and Sydney Seabrooks, is why Durante is so bullish on her program’s future.
But with that optimism comes higher expectations.
“We can’t come in where we left off,” said Durante. “We have to come in ahead of where we left off. That means your skills are already refined, we have those new combinations, we’re already in a more advanced place than where we were last year or the year before. So we’ll do summer check-ins. We’ll do some different things to help them stay motivated and excited and remember those things. They have a really good plan of what that should look like and what that needs to look like for us to take that next step.”
The next step, Durante says, is doing things UNC Gymnastics has never done before, and elevating the program even higher on the national stage. That progress starts at home, and Durante said she can’t wait for her team to perform in front of Tar Heel fans at Carmichael Arena once again.
“I’m excited about the energy and the community,” she said. “We’ve grown our community support and our community awareness of what Carolina Gymnastics is doing. And I’m excited to continue to build that. I want to sell out Carmichael. Come help us do that. I cannot wait for that place to be rocking for gymnastics five times in 2027.”
Featured image via UNC Athletic Communications
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