On a February afternoon in Providence, Rhode Island, with the meet slipping away on the beam, Corrinne Tarver stood on the sidelines bracing for a loss against Brown University.
“We had some mistakes, and I thought, ‘There’s no way. We just gave the meet away,'”recalls Tarver, who was named head coach of Southern’s gymnastics program in June 2025.
Then junior Gabriela Dinisoe stepped up, the final gymnast to compete.
All eyes turned to the final routine.
“And she did great,” says Tarver, whose all-around gymnastics championship win at the University of Georgia made NCAA women’s gymnastics history in 1989.
Now, on that February day, she watched the final score flash on the board. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we just did it!’” she says. Southern had pulled off a razor-thin win against the Division I Ivy League team.
For Tarver, the joyful moment confirmed what she has believed since she started coaching the team last summer: the Owls have the potential to “do some damage” in women’s collegiate gymnastics.
It’s a belief grounded in experience. In her last role at Nashville’s Fisk University, Tarver was charged with launching the first NCAA gymnastics team at a historically Black college — building the program in just four months while doubling as the school’s athletic director.
“Being the first HBCU [program], I knew that we couldn’t just have a team. We needed to have a good team. We needed to make a statement,” Tarver says. “So, I began recruiting, and it was fun. It was a lot of sleepless nights trying to figure out what needed to be done.”
Tarver and the historic team soon found themselves in the national spotlight, filmed by a documentary team and appearing on “Good Morning America,” “Today,” and “The Jennifer Hudson Show.” The team packed arenas.
“We had either a soldout or record crowd. It was crazy,” Tarver recalls. Under her leadership, the program produced five All-Americans and the USA Gymnastics National All-Around Champion.
At Southern, Tarver has set an equally high bar: to build a Division II program that will “get people in Connecticut excited about college gymnastics.” Among her top priorities are raising scholarship dollars to attract and retain recruits, bringing fans back to the stands, engaging alumni, and making sure her current athletes recognize how good they are — and how great they can be.
“So much of gymnastics is mental. So getting the athletes to believe in themselves is a major part of what needs to happen to be successful,” she says. “Part of our strength is that we have so much raw material to work with. We have a lot of talented athletes, but some don’t know how talented they are.”
Tarver first fell in love with gymnastics as a 5-year-old in dance school where she learned to tumble. She later practiced gymnastics with her sister for fun at a community program at the local high school in her hometown of Mount Vernon, New York.
Formal training wouldn’t come until “fourth or fifth grade,” and even then, it was more recreational than competitive. “The first gym I went to was in the basement of a church. We had to move the equipment in and out after every practice,” she recalls. She later joined a YWCA program that shared space with other sports.
In eighth grade, she moved to a gym in Stamford, Connecticut, with stronger coaching and better facilities, where her career as an elite gymnast took off. Three years later, she’d be competing on the U.S. national team, a feat she repeated the summer after her senior year of high school.
The University of Georgia took notice, offering her a full scholarship to compete for their women’s gymnastics team. There, she helped lead the team to two NCAA national championships and blazed a trail for gymnasts of color. She became the first Black female gymnast to win the NCAA all-around gymnastics championship and earned All-American honors nine times.
After graduating with a degree in social work, Tarver earned a law degree from New York Law School, with plans to become a sports agent. But an internship at a sports agency changed her mind. “I just couldn’t see myself doing that for the rest of my life,” she says.
At the suggestion of her college coach, she pursued an internship in sports compliance “and loved it.” She would spend the next decade enforcing NCAA rules and regulations, with administrative roles at Syracuse University, Stockton University, and the NCAA Division I Northeast Conference.
Through internships, the bar exam, and a new career, she never gave up gymnastics, coaching on the side whenever she could squeeze it in. But a move prompted by her mother’s cancer diagnosis — and an assistant coaching opportunity at the University of Pennsylvania — eventually drew her back to the gym full time. After three years and the birth of a daughter with medical needs, she again moved to a part-time role and spent another 10 years coaching a local club team. In 2022, Fisk called, asking her to lead its inaugural women’s gymnastics program.
“I was honored, and I was excited. I love taking on challenges, so I was excited about starting a program from scratch,” says Tarver, who coached the team until 2025. Despite the program’s success, Fisk discontinued it at the end of the 2026 season, citing logistical challenges. Still, the experience underscored Tarver’s ability to build and lead a program from the ground up.
Now, Tarver is channeling that drive into bringing Southern gymnastics to the next level. “It’s a program that was around when I was a gymnast, and I remember looking up to it,” she says. “I’m excited to show how much more we can do as a team.”
One of her biggest priorities is fundraising, which includes hosting club competitions with proceeds going to scholarships. “We’ve heard from very, very talented athletes who are interested in coming to Southern, but because we can’t match what some other schools are offering them, we sometimes can’t compete,” she says.
She also believes it’s important to recognize alumni. Soon after she arrived, she noticed there was no national championship banner honoring the SCSU men’s gymnastics team, which won three Division II titles in 1973, 1975, and 1976. So, she approached Terrance Jones, director of athletics at Southern, who agreed to have one raised in honor of the 50th anniversary of their 1976 win.
“Even though we don’t have a men’s gymnastics team anymore, they brought prominence to the university,” she says. “We wanted to show them that we appreciate everything they did.”
