New assistant coach will replace retiring Dick Foxal

When it came down to finding a solid assistant gymnastics coach at Oregon State, the search was easy.

John Carney not only has known OSU coaches Tanya and Michael Chaplin for years, but he is familiar with most of the Beavers gymnasts through his time as a club coach in the Seattle area.

The Beavers needed an assistant to fill the spot left by retired coach Dick Foxal, who was with OSU for 21 seasons.

Carney, 41, comes to OSU from Gymnastics East in Bellevue, Wash., where he coached since 2001.

“The coaching style that Michael and Tanya have fit really well with what my beliefs are as a coach,” he said. “So I felt it would be a smooth transition into coaching styles and being able to work together as a full-functional team.”

Carney is very familiar with one OSU gymnast. He coached Jen Kesler to five Level 10 national titles while she was training at Gymnastics East.

He also knows a lot of the other athletes from their club days.

“He knows quite a few of our athletes, so it helps with the transition that any program goes through when you’re changing your coaching staff,” Tanya Chaplin said. “I think that will help tremendously with the familiarity that John has with some of our athletes already.”

Carney went through the Junior Olympics program as a youth and spent one year at Cal State Fullerton.

“I couldn’t get gymnastics out of my system so for the whole duration of about 25 years, I’ve been coaching,” he said.

Carney said he started thinking about the move to coaching college gymnastics about four or five years ago. He figured it was a natural next step in his career and a new challenge.

While most of his coaching career was spent at clubs, Carney did get some college experience as an assistant at Seattle Pacific University for the 2000-01 season in between stints at Northwest Aerials (1993-2000) and Gymnastics East.

“I kind of spent my time trying to go to clubs where they had coaches that were getting the results that I wanted to be able to achieve as a coach,” Carney said.

Carney coached eight Junior Olympics national championship teams.

“He has accomplished some great things with his athletes and I knew that he was very interested in getting into college gymnastics, so this worked well for all of us,” Chaplin said.

Carney will coach the Beavers on bars and will probably collaborate with the Chaplins on the other events.

“I think we’ll have a real strong collaboration on the events where we can bounce things off each other and see what things really work well together,” he said.