Sophomore Standout Kailin Chio Channels LSU’s Legacy

“Leave It To Kailin Chio To Get The Job Done”

Kailin Chio has a playlist she calls “It’s Go Time”… “I just hit shuffle and then I let it go.”

On Friday night before she’s introduced in the PMAC for LSU’s home-opener against the Kentucky Wildcats, you better believe it will be on full blast.

​Coming off a loss (196.850-197.200) to an inspired Georgia Bulldog team last week, and finishing second on a 6-score tie-breaker to the seven-time National Champion Oklahoma Sooners (197.500) at the 2026 Sprouts Collegiate Quad to kick off their season on January 10, the Tigers will be looking for a little redemption this week. With that, the PMAC is certain to be lit up by a team ready to rewrite the headlines (and a crowd ready to raise the roof), and prove to everyone that a run for the SEC Championship and National Championship in 2026 is still right within their reach.

Chio will be as hyped as anyone to be back on her home floor and ready to make some noise. Individually, her season has started strong. Her accolades are growing, and everyone continues to take notice of just how special a competitor she is. During the live broadcast of the Sprouts Collegiate Quad, ESPN commentator Samantha Peszek had high praise for the LSU sophomore. Following Chio’s nearly perfect beam routine in a must-hit situation in the Tigers’ final rotation, Peszek delivered the message: “Leave it to Kailin Chio to get the job done.”

Chio won the meet, picking up exactly where she left off in a stellar freshman campaign, where she was described by the Tigers as the cornerstone of the LSU lineup. Stacking up almost every honor imaginable, including the 2025 NCAA Championships on vault to become only the third freshman in LSU history to win an individual NCAA title, Chio made 14 appearances in the All-Around, recorded a career-high 39.800, the highest All-Around score by an LSU freshman in 2025, and finished her season with a 39.513 average.

She also made a little more SEC history when she set the record for the most SEC Freshman of the Week honors in a single season, taking home nine out of 11 awards in 2025. Not surprisingly, she ultimately was named the 2025 SEC Freshman of the Year.

It was a dream start. The beginning of a legacy career. But Chio put that into perspective quickly when we spoke in December. And she wants more.

“Freshman year was a whirlwind,” she told us. “I couldn’t even imagine. Walking in last year, I was just so excited to be here and didn’t really know what to expect. I did my gymnastics, and everything worked out the way that it did. I honestly couldn’t imagine anything different. I’m super-pleased with how last year went and that my preparation paid off. Going into this year, I’m trying to have the same mindset.”

​That mindset is primarily fueled by her and her team’s focus on bringing the title they won in 2024 back to Baton Rouge in 2026. While Chio’s freshman season was stellar, one thing was missing at the end of the day: the National Championship. After winning the SEC Championship in March, the Tigers looked primed to challenge for back-to-back titles and headed into postseason with the No. 1 ranking, but came up short in their semifinal in Fort Worth, finishing third behind Utah and UCLA and ahead of Michigan State.

​“I think it’s fueled a lot of us, not just me, but I think the whole team, personally,” Chio said. “I think that we looked back and realized that some of the things that we did, not necessarily wrong, but that we could have done better. I think that it’s fueled a lot of us, and we’re ready to go back out there, and we’re just hungry for more.”

Climbing Up, Climbing Back

While the 2026 season so far hasn’t started the way the Tigers trained for, Chio’s sophomore campaign is back on track after being limited to bars at LSU’s Gym 101 on January 2, to protect a rolled ankle. Following her standout meet at Sprouts, she was named the Week 2 SEC Gymnast of the Week. Last week, despite a fall on bars in the first rotation in Stegeman against Georgia, she rallied back to score a 9.925 on vault, 9.850 on floor, and a sensational 9.950 to match her career-high on beam. Winning both vault and beam made for 27 career titles to date. If she continues on the trajectory she’s currently on for the Tigers, she’ll become one of the most decorated athletes the program has ever seen.

​Overcoming early challenges in a season already headlined by upsets could be exactly what the Tigers need to go lights out going forward. For Chio, it’s all about staying normal. Nothing extra. Just do your gymnastics.

She told us she believes part of the team’s challenge in Fort Worth last year was being too in their heads about the competition and the job in front of them, and trying to be too perfect instead of doing their normal gymnastics the way they did at SECs. It’s something she wants to make sure she meets head-on going forward.

“I think that our mindsets shifted from SECs when we went out there, and everybody did their best gymnastics—we did our best gymnastics being so calm and just so loose. [At NCAA Championships], starting on bars, we didn’t have our greatest rotation ever. That had the team a little bit more on edge, and believing that now we have to be perfect in order to try to move on. Trying to be perfect made it worse. Instead of us trying to do our normal, we were just trying to be too perfect at Nationals, and it just led us in the wrong direction.”

That recognition is part of the growth she’s undergone from her freshman year to now, alongside learning and embracing her role as a new leader and mentor to the freshman class. She said she’s enjoying sharing her experience as a student athlete with them and providing them with support in any way she can.

“I know what to expect. I’m not walking in blindsided,” she said. “Now, I’m just trying to help and be a leader for those freshmen, and our transfers, and just guide them in the best way possible. They’re doing a great job. It’s hard coming in as a freshman. I think all of the freshmen have done a really good job of just trying to learn the different roles in the different aspects of LSU gymnastics and play their part.”

It’s a sentiment LSU head coach Jay Clark echoed about Chio going into this season.

“Kailin has shown a tremendous amount of growth in terms of her maturity and learning to deal with success, and sometimes, adversity, or outcomes that she doesn’t like,” Clark told us. “Emotionally, she’s much more mature than she was, and able to control her reactions to circumstances, and therefore she has been able to become a better leader and example for the entire team. It’s great when you can see freshmen go from one stage to the next, as they often do. There’s a lot of examples of that on our team, and I think Kailin is one of those in a long line who is going through that and doing great.”  

Locked In

Chio’s level-headed approach to competition no doubt has played a huge factor in her success to date, as has her ability to overcome any obstacles thrown her way. Her ability to lock into the job ahead and dial in to near-perfect routines time after time has become one of her trademarks. And, just part of her personality, she said.

“That’s just how I’ve always been as a gymnast and competing. When it’s time to lock in, I’ll lock in. My club coaches did a really good job of preparing me. I wouldn’t be here without them. They shaped me into the person and gymnast I am today.”

Chio trained at trained at Gymcats under Cassie Rice and Jill Preston in Henderson, Nevada, and is quick to credit them for helping her hone her focus early on.

“My whole life was spent over there. They did a really good job preparing me for pressure sets, and just trying to be as free as you can until it’s your turn to go because you want to be loose. You don’t want everything to be so dramatic and so uptight. You want to be able to have fun when you’re competing. The ability for me to lock in and be so dialed in and focused has always been a good trait that I’ve had. I’m just super blessed to have it.”

Clark agrees.

“Kailin is one of the most incredibly consistent performers I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I don’t think from a gymnastics perspective, a freshman year that had quite that level of consistent result—and there’s been a lot of great ones in the past that have had amazing freshman years. The question is can she not try to duplicate, and can she stay true to the things that work for her.

​“Her aerial sense is uncanny. She knows how to land when it’s not the best dismount or vault—she has an uncanny way of finding those landings and being able to create a great result for herself. She’s endearing herself at a greater level to her teammates this year, and I look forward to seeing that continued growth through her career.”

Chio is also no stranger to overcoming adversity. A major back injury in 2022 delayed her senior Elite debut, and kept her from pursuing a run at the Olympics after a very promising career as a junior, where she took first on vault, third on floor, and fifth in the All-Around and on beam at the 2021 U.S. Championships. Despite some extremely tough days and uncertainty about her next steps following her injury, it made her stronger, she said, and now she sees it as a blessing.

“My back injury a few years ago really set me back. That was my first-ever major injury for as long as I can remember doing the sport. I tried to take it one step at a time. It was really hard in the beginning. I don’t know if I ever thought that I’d never do gymnastics again. I think there’s always a thought of, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to accomplish my lifetime goal of wanting to go to the Olympics.’ I didn’t know what was possible after [my injury] because I still had my whole future ahead of me. I think I knew I was going to flip again at some point. I just tried to keep the best positive attitude that I could.”

Once Chio arrived at LSU in the fall of 2024, her love for gymnastics was restored. She credits her coaches, the support staff, and, of course, her teammates for always being there.

“They want you to be who you are as a person, and they really care about who you are as a person more than you are as a gymnast, because obviously everybody’s recruited here for the gymnastics, and everybody here wants to win a national championship,” she said. “They really focused on wanting you to be authentic to yourself. That was really important to me, just knowing that you can be who you are and still feel welcome anywhere that you go.”

It’s something she wants every recruit to feel, too. “Getting able to return the favor of showing them what LSU gymnastics is about, showing them that I was once in their shoes and I want to be all in for them because it’s like I wanted everybody else to be all in for me when I was in that position,” she said.

​Looking ahead, Chio knows being part of an incredibly competitive conference loaded with legacy rivalries will only make her better. She said she’s able to channel any pressure to be her very best for her team, and that any actual rivalries are different than what you might expect.

“Everybody has a target on their back. We just go into every single meet focused on us; it’s not about anybody else on the floor. I think everybody said we have rivals, Oklahoma, Florida, all that,” she said. “I think that it’s more of, our rival is our own rival. We want to be better than we were the meet before. Even if that meet was spectacular, we want to be better than that to move forward and move in the right direction. At the end of the day, it does come down to you being your own rival. And at that point, the only thing you can be is yourself to try to be better.”

For Chio, who noted shopping, sleeping, and coffee dates as favorites for filling whatever free time she may have left in an ultra-busy week, LSU has become home and has already given and taught her so much. “The support from everybody. It’s so unmatched here,” she said. “As a student athlete, it’s the love and the support and the respect that you have from everybody. It never goes unnoticed.”

Being at home in the PMAC with her team is everything to her and everything LSU gymnastics is all about. With seven SEC teams currently ranked in the top 10, the season is just getting started, and Chio cannot wait to run out of the tunnel and be back on her home floor.

“It’s packing the PMAC, 13,000 people watching you. It’s insane,” she said. “Getting your name announced, it’s what you dream about—being on the team and being a part of this legacy and being a part of everything that you wanted to be here for. Living in the moment for each and every single one of my teammates is so special.”

No. 4 LSU is back in action next Friday as they host Kentucky for their home opener in the PMAC on Friday, January 23 at 6:30 p.m. CT on ESPN2.

Watch Season 4 of The Climb Here!

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