From Augusta to NCAA champion: Keira Wells sticks a vault of a lifetime
For a split second, Keira Wells was still in the air, twisting above the vault table under the bright lights of Dickies Arena.
Then came the landing.
Clean. Emphatic. Absolute.
And when the 2023 Augusta graduate froze the finish Thursday night at the NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships in Fort Worth, Texas, the reaction said everything.
Wells’ face lit up. Oklahoma associate head coach Lou Ball erupted. Three judges flashed perfect 10s. By the time the score settled at 9.975, Wells had not only delivered the best vault of her college career, she had made herself the national champion.
For the Wichita gymnastics community that watched her rise from a club standout into one of the best vaulters in the country, it was anything but a surprise for her to win on vault.
Long before Wells became an All-American at Oklahoma, vault was the event that separated her. As a Level 10 gymnast out of 316 Gymnastics Academy, she was a three-time consecutive national vault champion in 2019, 2021 and 2022. That’s what made her a recruiting target for OU, the premier women’s gymnastics program in the country.
Now, she has carried that specialty all the way to the NCAA summit.
Wells opened Oklahoma’s night in Session II as the leadoff gymnast on vault, a pressure-packed assignment even for veterans. Instead of merely setting a tone, she detonated the meet. Her Yurchenko 1.5 — using a backward entry onto the vault, exploding off the table, then flipping through the air with one and a half twists before landing — was aggressive, dynamic and, most importantly, stuck. It was the kind of landing that instantly changes the emotional temperature for an entire team.
“When someone comes down and is as aggressive as she was and sticks that very first vault, it lights a fire,” Oklahoma head coach K.J. Kindler told ESPN during the broadcast. “Our team was just inspired by that.”
The Sooners certainly looked inspired. Powered by Wells’ 9.975, OU piled up a 49.750 on vault, which became the highest vault score in NCAA semifinal history and the best vault rotation in program history at the NCAA Championships. The Sooners went on to post the top team score of either semifinal at 198.3000 to advance to Saturday’s national championship meet, where they will be joined by Florida, LSU and Minnesota with the competition slated to begin at 3 p.m. on ABC.
When Session I ended earlier Thursday, LSU’s Kailin Chio and Kaliya Lincoln shared the lead at 9.9625. By the end of the night, the junior from Augusta stood alone as the 2026 NCAA vault champion.
“I had the mindset that anything can happen,” Wells told SoonerSports.com. “I was ready for anything and I was just out there to do it for my team, not really for myself.”
The headline for Wells will be the vault crown, and rightly so, but her performance was much more than one shining moment. She also delivered a 9.90 on beam in the No. 2 spot for Oklahoma and another 9.90 on floor in the No. 3 spot, giving the Sooners three huge routines in a meet where every tenth mattered. Her title-clinching vault may have been the flashpoint, but her full night looked like that of a gymnast completely at ease on the sport’s grandest stage.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise.
As a freshman in 2024, she earned second-team All-America honors on vault. She repeated that as a sophomore in 2025. This season, she moved up again, claiming first-team All-America status on vault and establishing herself as one of the nation’s elite performers on the event. So Thursday was not a fluke or an out-of-nowhere breakthrough. It was the natural next step for a gymnast who has been on this trajectory for years.
Wells is now the fifth Oklahoma gymnast to win the NCAA title on vault, adding her name to one of the deepest championship traditions in college gymnastics. Oklahoma has turned Fort Worth into familiar territory over the last decade, advancing to 12 NCAA finals in the last 13 years and winning seven national championships since 2014. Wells was already part of a team national champion last season. Now she owns an individual NCAA crown as well.
For those back home, it gives the local gymnastics scene another landmark moment. Wells is not the first from the Wichita area to win the NCAA individual vault title. That distinction belongs to Wichita native and Maize graduate Diandra Milliner, who won a share of the 2013 NCAA vault championship for Alabama with a 9.925 and also helped the Crimson Tide win team national titles in 2011 and 2012.
But Wells’ moment had long felt possible.
When she committed to OU in 2023, Wells allowed herself to imagine one day being part of a scene like the one that unfolded Thursday night in Fort Worth.
“It was crazy watching them win a national championship on TV and thinking, ‘That might be me out there,’” Wells told The Eagle back then.
On Thursday night, she was.
Not just present. Not just contributing. Owning the moment.
The image that will last is easy to see: Wells sticking the vault, the first flicker of disbelief giving way to joy, the judges rewarding it, the arena buzzing because everyone inside understood they had just witnessed something special. The score was 9.975. The result was a national championship. The meaning reached far beyond one night.
From Augusta to Wichita to the top of NCAA gymnastics, Wells spent years building toward this moment.
On Thursday, she turned that journey into history.
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