Avery Neff is the No. 1 recruit in 2024, a Utah gymnastics commit, and now College Gym News’ highest rated prospect yet

The hype surrounding Avery Neff has never been greater.

The No. 1 overall recruit in 2024 — a Utah native and Red Rocks commit — Neff is now the highest rated women’s gymnastics prospect to date in College Gym News’ rankings.

The rankings only started in 2020, a significant caveat to be sure, but in the newly released recruiting rankings Neff ranks higher than some very notable gymnasts who have competed at the NCAA level since 2021.

Gymnasts such as Florida’s Leanne Wong, Oregon State’s Jade Carey, Auburn’s Sunisa Lee, Utah’s Kara Eaker and Grace McCallum, UCLA’s Jordan Chiles and Selena Harris, and, well, the list goes on and on.

Neff’s rating of 98 suggests that she has all-around potential to the tune of scores in the 39.800 range. That means an average score of 9.95 on every event.

By way of comparison, the only gymnasts who recorded a score that high in a single meet last season were the aforementioned Carey, Chiles, Wong and Lee, as well as Florida’s Trinity Thomas, LSU’s Haleigh Bryant and Aleah Finnegan and Michigan’s Abby Heiskell and Gabby Wilson.

The only prospect that comes close to Neff in the all-time rankings — which at this point now span five recruiting classes — is the No. 2 overall recruit in 2024, Oklahoma commit Lily Pederson, who has a rating of 94.

Utah gymnastics has two top-10 ranked commits for the 2024 class in Neff and Zoe Johnson (84), with a third five-star recruit — Canadian Clara Raposo (82) — coming in at No. 12 overall.

Why is Utah gymnastics commit Avery Neff so highly rated?

It is actually easy to understand why Neff is so well regarded.

Only this past May at the Level 10 national championships, Neff won the all-around title in the Senior A competition, finishing first on balance beam and floor exercise, second on vault, while tying for seventh on uneven bars.

Before that, she was co-champion of the Nastia Liukin Cup, finishing top five on every event.

Her notable wins go on and on, though. Inside Gymnastics’ Ashlee Buhler probably put it best when she wrote, “She (Neff) is widely considered to be the top level 10 gymnast in the country, taking just about every major title there is from the coveted Nastia Cup crown in 2023 to winning seven national titles (two of which were All-Around titles) over the last three years.”

Of Neff and her current lofty ranking, CGN’s Rebecca Scalley writes, “She’s just a machine. We’ve never given anyone a point total like 98 before, but with maximum score points on every event and routines that could anchor Utah lineups tomorrow, what is there to deduct?”

There is some nuance to gymnastics recruit rankings, of course, as there is in every sport.

As explained when the rankings debuted in 2020, “the system combines ‘score points’ from a recruit’s recent competition history with ‘video review points’ based on analysis from available videos to come up with a final score out of 25 for each event for a total of 100 to determine a star rating. Elite gymnast ratings are calculated solely on video review. Gymnasts who earn a 5-star classification received at least 78 total points while 4-star recruits have between 63 and 77 points and 3-stars received at least 48.”

“The points formula is intended to describe the current level of the gymnast rather than put a limit on her potential,” CGN data editor Jenna King explained. “A 5-star rating is the equivalent of saying that the gymnast could make multiple lineups at a top-10 program tomorrow.

“The ‘score points’ part of the equation is heavily weighted by consistency in USAG level 10 competition during the last two years, while the ‘video review points’ are based on qualitative categories that are important in NCAA scoring, including form, technique and difficulty level.”

Three years later, ranking gymnastics recruits remains a very difficult endeavor. Elite gymnasts — those who compete for spots on Olympic and world championship teams for example — especially.

“Elites are much harder to project than level 10s because they’re generally performing much more difficulty than will be required in college,” King writes. “We can’t rely on scores for half the rating like we can with level 10s because elite scores are just on a completely different scale and therefore unusable by comparison. There are fewer elite meets as well, so that’s a small sample size to use for competition videos.

“We use a separate rubric entirely when rating elites’ videos, and we try to focus on the simpler skills that may be brought to college, but unfortunately it’s still really hard to make assumptions about what their gymnastics would be like with college-level routines, especially in terms of consistency. All this is to say that if your favorite elites didn’t receive the rating you expected, they’re still going to be highly sought after by top teams due to their incredible skill repertoire and high-pressure competition experience.”

Difficulty in rankings aside, though, there is no disputing it. Neff is the prize of the 2024 class and Utah is better off with her committed.