ESPN Unleashes 4DREPLAY as NCAA Women's Gymnastics Championships Hit ABC Men's championships to follow Saturday night on ESPN2 By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital Friday, April 18, 2025 - 9:57 am
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Saturday (4 p.m. ET) marks the fifth consecutive year that ESPN will broadcast the finals of the NCAA Women's Gymnastics Championships on ABC.
Throughout that half decade, the broadcaster has introduced a wave of innovations to improve the live-viewing experience of this rapidly growing sport. From live leaderboards (which, in gymnastics, is far more complicated than it sounds) to graphical enhancements that illustrate the elite athleticism of the student-athletes, ESPN has revolutionized the presentation of women's gymnastics.
The trend continues this year with the debut of 4DREPLAY on two apparatuses: vault and uneven bars. The technology produces volumetric, time-slice frozen moment replays that immerse viewers in a previously impossible perspective of the sport's most dynamic moments. The image is produced by stitching together images from 30 cameras arranged in a semicircle around the apparatus.
Gymnastics delivers a perfect environment for volumetric replays provided by 4DReplay, says Phil Orlins, VP, production technology and innovation, ESPN. The vault and uneven bars offer close proximity and an eye-level shot of the athlete that is ideal for showcasing the dynamic action. These time-slice freezes give us the tools to provide in-depth analysis of fast-moving content like never before.
Orlins and ESPN have plenty of experience with 4DREPLAY, having used it most recently on events like the 2024 MLB Home Run Derby.
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Video clip courtesy of ESPN.
Tech That Bridges the Gap
Beyond the 4DREPLAY integration, ESPN's broadcast team stationed at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, TX, continues to enhance the understanding of gymnastics with such tools as height meters and protractors providing relatable metrics for viewers.
The enhancements are valuable also for the analysts on the broadcast: Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman, silver medalist Samantha Peszek, and three-time Olympian John Roethlisberger.
Tech tools, like the protractors and the height meters, create a relationship between what is happening and what [the fans] already know, says Roethlisberger, a member of the U.S. Olympic Team in 1992 (Barcelona), 1996 (Atlanta), and 2000 (Sydney) while competing collegiately at the University of Minnesota. Everyone knows how high a basketball hoop is. When we show the height meter on vault or bars and it goes 6 ft. above the high bar, which is already 8 ft. off the ground and we say that [the gymnast's] head is 14 ft. above the floor, every human in the world goes, 14 ft., that's 4 ft. higher than a basketball hoop. That's 4 ft. higher than Anthony Edwards can dunk a basketball.' There's a lot of those things that have helped make [the sport] more understandable and relatable to the audience.
Roethlisberger also credits women's collegiate gymnastics for developing a set of rules and a scoring system that make it much easier for the audience to follow compared with other disciplines of the sport.
Women's college gymnastics has figured out how to make the rules the most understandable rules on the planet Earth, he says. Because of that, along with all the things that networks like ESPN have done to bring it to your living room and make it understandable and visually appealing, every person that watches gymnastics, by the third night, [is watching a routine and] going, That's 9.9. I remember, two nights ago, she got a 9.8 when she took a big step forward on her landing and Aly and Sam said that cost her two-tenths. Now she stuck it, and that's going to be a 9.9.' That is what women's college gymnastics has done and no other version of gymnastics has done.
All the tech enhancements, including slow-motion-capable cameras and in-depth replay, do create an interesting dynamic for the sport.
It's a blessing and a curse in some ways, says Peszek, who was a member of the U.S. Olympic Team in 2008 and competed collegiately at UCLA. We have the ability to show replays in slow motion, and guess who doesn't get to see the replays in slow motion: the judges. To John's point about the [fan] conversation of I thought she should have scored this' while watching a side-by-side replay and the only people that don't have the luxury of watching it are the judges, I think we're getting a lot of heated conversation around judging. We have the ability to take a microscope to everybody's routine and each skill and the protractor, and we replay it to see if it was actually vertical. I think what a lot of fans don't take into account is where the judges are sitting, the angle that they're at. Also, they're seeing it in real time, and humans have the ability to make errors.
Enhanced Fan Engagement With Stream Team Beyond the championship on ABC, ESPN+ will again feature its popular Stream Team coverage, bringing personality and insight directly from a lineup of NCAA greats. This year's team comprises Olympic silver medalist and Florida legend Bridget Sloan, Oklahoma's four-time NCAA champion Anastasia Webb, 11-time All-American Kennedy Baker, and ESPN newcomer Trinity Thomas, an 11-time NCAA All-American and two-time Honda Award winner.
In a fresh twist for 2025, instead of traditional apparatus-only streams, viewers can follow specific teams throughout the arena on dedicated feeds with tailored commentary. Each stream pairs two teams with expert analysis, letting fans personalize their experience in unprecedented ways.
Immediately following the women's final, the NCAA Men's Championship takes center stage on ESPN2
