This feature originally appeared in the 2025-26 Winter edition of the Cal Sports Quarterly. The Cal Athletics flagship magazine features long-form sports journalism at its finest and provides in-depth coverage of the scholar-athlete experience in Berkeley. 




There's a palpable ambition in the air this year at the Golden Bear Rec Center, a resolve that's being polished day-by-day.

As the building's soaring north-facing windows make silhouettes of the high bar specialists and sunbeams illuminate the ever-present wafts of chalk floating through the air, that drive can be seen in each gymnast that speeds down the vault runway, the focus apparent in the face of each young man that grasps the parallel bars as he slowly rotates his legs into a controlled L-sit.

Unspoken: We're hungry. We're ready.

Perhaps no one is hungrier than the trio of three former California gymnasts –head coach Bryan Del Castillo and assistant coaches Karl Ziehn and Donothan Bailey – who oversee it all. It's not a new mentality for the program, which has over 100 years of rich tradition and success, but the spark blazes just a little brighter after the 2025 NCAA Championships -  where Cal became the only squad at the meet to hit all of its routines (meaning that it successfully executed them with no falls) and bring them oh-so-close to clinching one of the six coveted Day Two spots. At the time, Del Castillo was acting as interim head coach while Ziehn was in his second year as an assistant with the Golden Bears.

Many teams would stew in their disappointment at ultimately falling just short, but instead of throwing up their hands, the Bears and their coaches chose to turn that heartbreak into something different: possibility. It can be done.

Del Castillo, a former U.S. National Team member and coach who started with the Bears as an assistant coach in the 2019-20 season, is fully committed to the responsibility he's been trusted with as permanent head coach and is deeply focused on his goals for the team.

"I felt like we were on a good trajectory (after NCAAs)," he said. "The culture of the gym was good and we were making progress in our performance. I want to see that continue and help push it to the next level."

That dedication is something that his squad recognizes and respects.

"Bryan is our strategist – always planning, always analyzing," said Jasper Smith-Gordon, a two-time Regular-Season All-American vaulter and redshirt senior with the Bears. "He's a steady presence that we can rely on."

Ziehn, a former U.S. National Team and elite youth coach, has more life experience under his belt, having graduated from Cal in 2003 (eight years before Del Castillo and 11 before Bailey), and is the quickest to find an opportunity for humor, with Smith-Gordon and the other gymnasts always counting on him to bring "fire and intensity" as well as a quip or funny story to the gym. Upon assuming the role of head coach, it was a no-brainer for Del Castillo to retain Ziehn on his staff.

"He brings this 'let's go for it' mentality and provides a lot of great technical knowledge and recruiting experience," Del Castillo said. "We make a good team and really balance each other out."

The team needed a third coach. Who better, Del Castillo figured, than to call up an old teammate? Enter Bailey, whose gymnastics career had overlapped with Castillo's from the junior level to the U.S. National Team level. Recently relocated from Colorado Springs, where he was coaching youth gymnastics while working with the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Bailey had no experience with Cal's current roster but quickly established trust with the gymnasts, who were put at ease by his kind personality and strong intuition into their needs as student-athletes.

"Don is consistently looking out for us," Smith-Gordon said. "He understands the athletes themselves as well as the technical side of the sport."

As well as they acquit themselves now, none of the trio pursued coaching right out of the gate after graduation. Del Castillo recalls walking into his old club gym to train and being asked to volunteer part-time, which grew into an eventual career in running his own youth gym.

"The first time a 6-year-old does a back handspring and how excited they are – it's just really rewarding," he said. "I like building things and seeing them develop and grow."

During the five years that Del Castillo coached club gymnastics, he received multiple job offers from former head coach JT Okada to return to Cal before he finally felt ready to accept in 2019.

"I knew there were very few opportunities available for this," he said. "Something that really fired me up was competing at the highest level, so I wanted to get back there and give back to a program that set me up for success."

Ziehn had been coaching at his parents' club gym since he was a teenager but had no desire to do so as a full-time professional career, having run into his fair share of disgruntled and overworked coaches. The former geotechnical engineer continued to pursue it as a hobby, moonlighting as a youth coach after his day job, and found after several years that it was coaching that brought him the most overall enjoyment as he led trampoline and tumbling specialists to age group titles on the world stage.

Still, by the time Ziehn and his family moved to Switzerland in 2019, he thought he was ready to walk away from coaching altogether due to burnout; within six months of living abroad, however, he found that he missed the lifestyle.

"Coaching is a lot like building a project," Ziehn said. "You've got to stare at it for a long time and figure out where you want it and how to do it. You get to know the kids and make different plans for different people. I really missed that project-based aspect of it, that long-term work towards a goal."

Over the next three-and-a-half years, he found himself not only coaching gymnasts but acting as program director of a startup parkour gym – and once his family returned to the U.S., he was messaged almost immediately by Okada, who invited him to drop by practice in his free time to act as an extra set of eyes. Ziehn started coming in a couple of times a week, which gradually turned into a full-time gig with the Bears.

"The opportunities and needs came together here," he said. "I got more and more bought in as I got to know the team and saw that I could make some sort of impact."

Similarly to Ziehn, Bailey originally avoided coaching as a career due to not seeing a future in it but eventually gave it a go after retiring as a competitive gymnast, finding great success in coaching pupils to state and regional titles as well as a national title.

"I didn't want to not try and wonder 'what if?'," he said. "It feels right to give back to something that has given me so much, and the relationships that you make with a lot of the athletes is really rewarding."

Del Castillo may have been a longtime friend and role model of Bailey's -  the prospect of training with him one reason that he attended Cal in the first place -  but Bailey still felt hesitant when his old friend contacted him about the open coaching position. Was he ready to make another big adjustment to his life? Finally, he decided once again to take a leap of faith, finding that the pros of being closer to his old friends and the opportunity to gain coaching experience at a high level far outweighed the cons.

"Since being back, I've really enjoyed seeing myself in some of these kids and helping guide them toward success," he said. "Building relationships with these guys, helping them achieve their goals and realize their potential as a gymnast and a person has been really fun and fulfilling. I have an opportunity to share so much of what I've learned."

Cal's three coaches meet multiple times a week to keep their vision for the program unified and establish a consistent rhythm.

 "I'm trying to give Karl and Donothan autonomy in certain areas so they can grow in ways they want," Del Castillo said. "I want them to feel ownership of the program and what we're doing."

Although all three have their commonalities – among them being that they most enjoyed competing on parallel bars and high bar – their differences are apparent when asked about their favorite collegiate memories. Del Castillo casts his mind back to his biggest competitions, recalling the energy and satisfaction that swelled as he and his teammates hit routine after routine, stick after stick. Ziehn fondly speaks of long drives with his teammates to competitions at Santa Barbara, crammed into vans and forced to entertain (or annoy) each other to fend off boredom. Bailey quietly recounts the process of rediscovering his dwindling passion for the sport in his final year at Cal after questioning his future as an athlete, with Okada (then an assistant with the team) coming to the gym in his free time to provide extra one-on-one coaching.

It's that depth and variety of experience that the program relies on now in its quest to win a fifth national title and gain visibility within and outside the gymnastics world. Ziehn and Bailey agree that the longstanding history and community built around the program make Cal stand out amongst its peers, while Del Castillo speaks to the exceptional pursuits and character of each individual and the close-knit culture of the squad.

"Everyone's so always excited to be together," Bailey said. "The fact that so many guys stick around after graduation is really cool."

That brotherhood had another opportunity to manifest at November's intrasquad meet. The dozens of spectators squeezed inside the Bears' practice gym, armed with coffee and pastries, were a jovial mix of alumni, former coaches and longtime fans. A sizeable line of recent graduates arranged themselves somewhat awkwardly against a wall, still too recently removed from their own time in uniform to entirely avoid the pressure of the competitive atmosphere. Nearby, smaller clusters of alumni – their stints in the program having passed 10, 20, 30 years earlier – laughed more freely, teasing each other about old memories. As one, the crowd cast a curious yet discerning eye on this latest crop of gymnasts: What will you have to show us this year?

And in the middle of it all, three men stood – Del Castillo, Ziehn and Bailey – who are ready to make something special happen.