For the Michigan women’s gymnastics team, even in the highest-pressure situations, everything quiets when graduate Jenna Mulligan is competing. She’s the eye of the storm, a seasoned veteran on a team that has struggled with its youth at times this season.
When Mulligan is on the beam, everyone can take a deep breath and appreciate the grace and confidence with which she competes.
Mulligan’s grace belies the hard work that has gone into her gymnastics career. From a freshman walk-on to now a graduate student and leader, Mulligan has always approached gymnastics with a determined, positive attitude — and it’s that determination that makes her shine.
“ ‘Just have somebody tell me that I can’t do something,’ ” Michigan coach Bev Plocki told The Michigan Daily when asked to describe Mulligan. “That’s how I would define Jenna. She has enough drive, enough work ethic and enough confidence in herself that she’s going to absolutely prove that she can.”
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Jenna Mulligan has been a gymnast for almost as long as she’s been walking.
“She had so much energy as a small child,” Terri Arnold, Mulligan’s mother, told The Daily. “If I let her get a little five- or 10-minute power nap in the car coming back from somewhere, she was just up until midnight, one o’clock.”
Mulligan herself recalls “bouncing off the walls and jumping off the couches” — a good start for a budding gymnast. Arnold enrolled a toddler-aged Mulligan in gymnastics, hoping to help her work off some of that extra energy and give her a solid foundation for any sports she might want to do later. She began competing at age five, but there was no thought at the time that the sport might grow into a 20-year passion.
But Mulligan fell in love with the sport. Her commitment to gymnastics meant learning to balance school and sports at an early age, developing organizational skills that helped her excel both academically and athletically.
At age 12, she joined Gymnastics Unlimited, a club gym located in Jacksonville, Florida, with the goal of becoming a Level 10 gymnast.
“It didn’t matter what you asked her to do, she was going to make sure that she did it, and that work effort never changed,” Lisa Beadle, Mulligan’s head coach for six years at Gymnastics Unlimited, told The Daily.
It was at Gymnastics Unlimited where Mulligan first began to consider taking her gymnastics talent to the collegiate level. Varsity college gymnastics recruiting was — and still is — a competitive realm. During Mulligan’s recruitment, Arnold recalls there only being 68 universities with varsity women’s gymnastics programs at all levels, from Division I to Division III. Each program’s roster numbered 20 or less, meaning slots were hard to come by, to say the least.
Mulligan began working with Ashanée Dickerson Jacobs, who was an 11-time All-American for Florida and won a national championship with the Gators in 2013, at Gymnastics Unlimited. After college, Dickerson Jacobs returned to Jacksonville to coach at her old gym, where she met Mulligan and encouraged her to seriously consider a college gymnastics career.
“When (Dickerson Jacobs) started telling me, ‘Hey, you can really do this in college,’ I took a hard look in the mirror and realized that if I was going to do it, I needed to start believing in myself the way that (my coaches) believed in me,” Mulligan told The Daily. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘Yeah, you know what? I’m going to do this. … I’m going to find a way to make it happen.’ ”
Mulligan earned a few collegiate offers, but always had her eyes set on attending Michigan. She communicated with the Wolverines’ coaches throughout high school. According to Beadle, the pivotal moment in Mulligan’s recruitment came during her high school national competition, where she performed a Yurchenko 1.5.
“(Plocki) called me on the phone while we were on the floor … she said, ‘Looking good,’ ” Beadle recalled.
After her performance at Nationals, Mulligan was offered a spot as a preferred walk-on at Michigan. She chose to become a Wolverine, knowing she likely wouldn’t see the floor early. She was swayed by Michigan’s unique record of academic and athletic excellence, but it was the campus environment that sold her.
Mulligan’s unceasing work ethic is one of her defining traits. That’s how she got to Michigan, and that’s how she progressed from not seeing competition as a freshman walk-on to being a leader of the team in her fifth year as a graduate student. Despite not competing at all as a freshman, she lists the Wolverines’ 2021 national championship run as one of her favorite memories from her time in Ann Arbor.
In her sophomore and junior years, Mulligan occasionally competed on the vault and floor exercise, often as an alternate rather than a gymnast in the starting lineup. But that never discouraged Mulligan, whom Plocki described as one of the hardest workers on the team. Plocki recalled several moments where Mulligan would stay after practice to keep working through soreness and fatigue, and the coaches would have to rein her in and convince her to wait until she came back the next day.
“She’s always had the drive to be able to (work hard), even though she didn’t always have the easy path,” Plocki said. “Her maturation process was learning how to train smart as well as to train hard.”
In 2024, her senior year, the coaches rewarded Mulligan’s effort and character, surprising her with a scholarship on the first day of classes.
“That was definitely one of the greatest days in my life, just because everything that I’d worked for finally felt like it paid off,” Mulligan said. “Obviously, I walked on here. … As a high school athlete, everybody wants that scholarship, right? It just finally felt like I’d finally accomplished what I initially set out to do.”
Mulligan became a starter full-time as a senior, competing on beam, floor exercise and vault in every meet. She made the All-Big Ten Championship Team, twice scored 9.925 on floor, and was named the team’s Most Valuable Specialist.
Her hard work had finally paid off, but Mulligan was hungry for more.
“ ‘That’s not how I want to end,’ ” Plocki recalled Mulligan telling her after the 2024 season. “ ‘If I have the opportunity, I would love to come back and end on a better note.’ ”
Now, as her fifth and final season draws to a close, Mulligan’s journey has come full circle. She is a leader on this young Michigan team, a stalwart presence on vault and beam. She’s helped the freshmen keep their heads up through the trials and tribulations of a long season — the very same struggles of being an alternate or out of the rotation entirely that she worked through earlier in her career. For most of her career, she has been in the leadoff spot, but this year she has been competing in the middle of the lineup to provide more stability for a young team.
“It’s been great to be able to look to the younger girls on the team now and help them through some of the same things that I was going through and pass down that culture of what Michigan really stands for,” Mulligan said.
And she takes pride in helping her teammates through tough moments.
“You are here for a reason,” Mulligan said. “You belong on this team, even if it might not feel like it right now.”
Early on in her career, Mulligan learned that lesson from the older gymnasts on the team. She credits them with always making her feel just as much a part of the team as the all-arounders, and it’s that positivity and wisdom that she wants to pass on to her younger teammates now.
Mulligan did not take the easy path through college gymnastics, but the hard work and determination she learned along the way are what define her. More than any singular event, more than any meet, that determination is her legacy — and it will carry her far beyond the competition floor.
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