Any fellow University of Maryland Terrapin will want to pay close attention to this one, since Olympic legend Dominique Dawes, herself a proud Terp, is bringing her Dominique Dawes Gymnastics and Ninja Academy to South Jersey this summer. Dawes attended College Park right around the absolute peak of her global fame, returning to campus after making history at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and competing again at the 2000 Sydney Games before ultimately earning her bachelor’s degree in communications from Maryland in 2002.
The new 20,000 square foot facility takes over the former A.C. Moore retail space inside the East Gate Square shopping center, situated directly beside Home Depot, giving South Jersey families a genuinely large, purpose built home for youth gymnastics, tumbling, and ninja obstacle training. The academy welcomes children as young as 18 months all the way through age 18, offering programs spanning recreational gymnastics, junior development, tumbling mechanics, specialized homeschool fitness classes, and Ninja Warrior style obstacle courses, giving families across a wide range of ages and interests a genuine reason to walk through the door.
What sets the academy apart, though, is the philosophy Dawes built it around in the first place. Rather than replicating the high pressure, sometimes toxic culture historically associated with elite competitive gymnastics, Dawes designed her academies specifically to reject that model entirely, centering the entire program instead around positive reinforcement, genuine mental health support, and physical coordination development. That mission traces directly back to Dawes’s own advocacy work in the years following the high profile scandals that rocked USA Gymnastics, during which she became one of the sport’s most prominent voices calling for deep cultural reform, speaking out extensively against the abusive coaching methods that defined much of her own competitive era. Opening academies built around a genuinely safe, uplifting alternative became a natural extension of that advocacy, giving Dawes a direct way to shape the next generation’s experience in the sport rather than simply criticizing the old one from the sidelines.
This new South Jersey location marks the brand’s very first academy in the Northeast, and it’s serving as the anchor for a considerably larger planned expansion, with five to six additional academies planned across the greater Philadelphia and South Jersey region in the years ahead. Early enrollment is already open for a ten dollar deposit, and Dawes herself will personally host a free public Grand Opening event on Saturday, September 19, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., featuring facility tours, ninja obstacle demonstrations, and meet and greet opportunities with Dawes and other athletes associated with the academy.
Dawes herself remains one of the most decorated and genuinely trailblazing figures in American gymnastics history, affectionately known throughout the sport as Awesome Dawesome. A three time Olympian and Olympic gold medalist, she holds a place in the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame built on a career that reshaped the sport’s own history. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, she co-captained the legendary Magnificent Seven, the U.S. women’s gymnastics team that won the first ever Team Gold Medal in program history. At those same Games, she also won bronze in the floor exercise, becoming the first Black woman of any nationality to win an individual Olympic medal in gymnastics, a genuinely historic milestone in its own right. Two years earlier, in 1994, Dawes swept all four individual event titles, vault, bars, beam, and floor, along with the all-around title at the U.S. National Championships, recording multiple perfect 10 scores along the way. Across three consecutive Olympic Games, Barcelona in 1992, Atlanta in 1996, and Sydney in 2000, she captured four total Olympic medals, one gold and three bronze.
Beyond her competitive career, Dawes has built a genuinely substantial post-athletic résumé as well. She served as co-chair of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition alongside NFL quarterback Drew Brees during the Obama administration, and she later performed briefly on Broadway as Patty Simcox in Grease, worked as a sports commentator for Yahoo, and traveled the country as a motivational speaker. Born November 20, 1976, in Silver Spring, Maryland, Dawes, now 49, is married to Jeff Thompson and is the mother of four young children.
With her new academy opening in South Jersey this summer, Dawes brings her full legacy directly into the region, decades of elite competitive experience, a genuine commitment to reforming how young athletes experience the sport, and now a brand new, 20,000 square foot facility built to give the next generation of gymnasts and ninja athletes a genuinely safe, positive place to grow. For any fellow Terp keeping tabs on where Maryland alumni end up making an impact, this one lands right in South Jersey’s own backyard.
