Last Wednesday, Andrea Lawrence decided to pull down the USA Gymnastics banners hanging at The Children’s Gym, which she helps run in Portland. It was an easy decision for Lawrence, the chief operating officer of the gym.

Lawrence had watched the sentencing of former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, who has been accused of sexually abusing more than 265 girls. Lawrence and her gym colleagues no longer wanted to belong to the national organizing body, which she described at “corrupt from the inside-out.”

“They did not have the athletes’ safety in mind,” Lawrence said of USA Gymnastics on Tuesday. “I didn’t want their logo in the gym.”

But for many of the approximately 3,400 gyms that belong to USA Gymnastics — including Central Oregon Gymnastics Academy and Oregon Olympic Athletics, both in Bend, and Redmond Gymnastics, Academy — leaving the organization would come at a huge cost.

Unlike The Children’s Gym, which only offers recreational programs, all gyms in Central Oregon have competitive teams, and in order to compete at meets at any level, each athlete and coach must have a membership with USA Gymnastics.

Gyms must be members of the organization to host a meet or to enter a team in any competition sanctioned by USA Gymnastics. Giving up a USA Gymnastics membership would mean giving up competition entirely.

“You can’t go to meets; you can’t register for meets; you can’t do anything,” Central Oregon Gymnastics Academy owner Sharman Watt said last week. “Everything is through them and certified through them … I wouldn’t even be a member if I didn’t have to be.”

In many youth sports, competition is organized by a patchwork of national organizations, park and recreation district programs and independent teams and leagues. When children get older, they can compete for their middle school or high school team.

But gymnastics does not have those alternatives.

Aside from college gymnastics, which is an NCAA sport, all competitions, from the first local meet a gymnast enters as a 6-year-old to the national championships, are sanctioned by USA Gymnastics.

Because of this system, Watt said her gym would remain a member of USA Gymnastics.

She expected most, if not all, competitive programs in the U.S. to do the same.

Although USA Gymnastics plays an essential administrative role by organizing and insuring meets, Watt stressed that only the most elite gymnasts in the country train under national team coaches or have much interaction with the USA Gymnastics administrators who have been forced to resign in recent months.

Watt said the Nassar trial and ensuing controversy hasn’t affected the daily operations of her gym.

“It feels very far away from us,” she said. “We’re not board members. We don’t vote. We just pay them money.”

Last Thursday, the United States Olympic Committee announced that all members of the USA Gymnastics board must resign by Wednesday or USA Gymnastics would no longer be the governing body for the sport. On Wednesday, USA Gymnastics announced all its board members had stepped down and an interim board will be formed this month.

Jamie Ellingsen, who owns Redmond Gymnastics Academy with her husband, Raytcho Gospodinov, said they hope to maintain their membership with USA Gymnastics. But she doesn’t know if the organization would continue to exist in its current format, or what would take its place if it could no longer sanction youth meets, she said, leaving gym owners in limbo.

“As a gym owner, we’re obviously concerned about (USA Gymnastics) losing their accreditation, and we don’t know if our kids will be able to compete until they figure it out, because there isn’t another governing body,” Ellingsen said Monday. “It isn’t like you can choose another one to compete under.”

Ellingsen said that if USA Gymnastics were decertified, she hopes an alternative organization or perhaps state or regional organizations could step in to host meets, at least on an interim basis. (Molly Gill, the USA Gymnastics Oregon state chairman, declined to comment for this article.)

“I have a hard time believing that it wouldn’t be fixed, but it’s hard to say,” Ellingsen said. “If we stopped doing competitive gymnastics here, we could probably stay open for a few years, just doing recreational, but I think eventually it would close a lot of us. A lot of kids want to compete. They put this much time and energy into their training, they want to be able to go show that somewhere.”

Ellingsen said she has not gotten many questions about USA Gymnastics from parents in the past few weeks — and several parents at practice on Monday confirmed that it was not a big topic of conversation among them — but she is making sure her staff understands the gym’s policies.

“We used to be able to do social media or text people, and now you can’t do that,” Ellingsen said. “You have to make sure your younger coaches aren’t Instagramming their students. If you send a text message about a private lesson, you always need to (add) a parent, so there’s three people involved. We didn’t used to think about this stuff before 10-year-olds had phones.”

Mohini Bhardwaj de Freitas, the owner and women’s team head coach at Oregon Olympic Athletics and a silver medalist at the 2004 Athens Olympics, could not give a definitive answer about whether her gym would remain a USA Gymnastics member.

“I really don’t know — I can’t give you a yes or no,” Bhardwaj de Freitas said Tuesday, noting that any decision about the gym’s membership status would depend on what the parents of her gymnasts want to do and what happens at the national level in the coming months.

Lawrence, The Children’s Gym COO, acknowledged that membership in USA Gymnastics did have benefits, even for recreational gyms like hers. Parents could use the USA Gymnastics website to look for nearby member gyms for their children, which helped drive business.

Member gyms must meet a number of safety, personnel and insurance requirements in order to register, so USA Gymnastics member status indicated that a facility had met the criteria of a respected national governing body.

But Lawrence said affiliation with USA Gymnastics is now less likely to make parents feel comfortable. She would prefer to see an entirely new governing body before rejoining a national organization.

Lawrence also said she thinks she would have made the same decision even if the gym had a competitive team, but it would have been a harder decision knowing that parents and kids would likely be disappointed.

“I think I would’ve pulled a team meeting and said, we’re just going to pause (competing),” Lawrence said. “But it’s easy for me to say.”

—Reporter: 541-383-0305, vjacobsen@bendbulletin.com