When Nelligan arrived in Bermuda in September 2009, his gymnasts were training in a portion of a U.S.
“So coming here, I understood that my job was going to be about developing the program.” “While I was at Maryland, we didn’t have our own gym or our own locker room,” Nelligan said from his home on St. He knew he’d be building from the ground up - again - but this time, there’d be an oceanside view. When Nelligan was offered the position, he saw another opportunity to take a program to new heights. “But more than anything, I was just happy for him.” “I was really surprised, but the first thing I really started to think about was how it was going to be not having him around anymore,” Brett Nelligan said. Nelligan was already familiar with the country’s program because he had served as its interim coach when Terp gymnast and Bermuda native Jenny Wright competed at the 1997 World University Games. “I wasn’t quite ready for the rocking chair.” “After I retired, I spent the next two months in the gym working with the girls,” Nelligan said. So when Nelligan heard that Bermuda needed a new coach for its national gymnastics team, he booked a flight to the tiny island nation in the Atlantic about 650 miles from the United States. “I was constantly in maintenance mode because there was a real chance the program wasn’t going to survive.”Ĭonsumed by a desire to sustain and elevate his teams for more than three decades, the Massachusetts native admitted that when he finally decided to hand the program over to his son - then-assistant coach Brett Nelligan - in June 2009, he hadn’t thought much about life as a retiree.įor a man who had devoted more than a half-century of his life to gymnastics, it wasn’t easy. “My entire time at Maryland, I felt like a janitor,” Nelligan said with a laugh yesterday. And as a new sport struggling to establish a foothold, gymnastics seemed a logical casualty. During his 30-year tenure as the Terrapin gymnastics team’s coach, Bob Nelligan watched his program get cut three different times.Īfter the controversial 1986 death of men’s basketball legend Len Bias, a financially strapped athletics department initiated a series of budget cuts.
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