An unexpected career that led to a life at Olympic Gymnastics Center for Greg Mutchler

Greg Mutchler graduated from Bremerton High School in 1979 and set out to do construction. In fact, he did that for a short while, but then life intervened and led him back to gymnastics, a sport he did well in high school and turned out to be part of the rest of his life.

Mutchler, the 61-year-old owner-coach of Olympic Gymnastics Center in Silverdale, has built the center into a place where national-caliber gymnastics are being developed. One, Amanda Hall, just was inducted into the University of New Hampshire Hall of Fame.

It would have been unthinkable in the early years of OGC that college recruiters would visit in the hopes of signing one of Mutchler’s gymnasts. These days, major coaches around the country have Mutchler’s phone number and know how to get to the center just off the intersection of Newberry and Dickey Place. The University of California, Kentucky, Boise State and Denver have visited recently, to name a few.

Mutchler was a good athlete in high school, dabbling in football and wrestling and then leading a gymnastics team that was among best in state when coached by Bob Becker. Mutchler was nationally ranked and an All-American on the vault, and also did floor exercise and high bars.

He's also a son of the late Ralph Mutchler, who led the jazz band at Olympic College and was noted for his music arrangements, like the arrangement for "Tequila" the late Bill Bissell made famous as the marching band director at University of Washington football games. Half of his senior year he went to West Sound Technical Skills Center, where and took construction classes, and then one more year of advanced construction at OC.

Life was good for Mutchler.

He spent from April to November of 1981 on a 2,500-acre family farm in Northwood, North Dakota, that a cousin was running. But that experience of planting and harvesting beans, sunflowers and wheat in 16-hour days didn’t sit well with him.

“I knew it wasn’t cut out for me,” he says. “I drove tractor from six in the morning until 10 a night when we were harvesting. During the planting and harvesting we put in the most hours, about 115 hours a week.”

He didn’t think about coaching gymnastics. Instead, he came back from North Dakota and cut wood for two years and started framing houses (he estimates he did about 20). But his direction was about to change.

Mutchler took a part-time job coaching at Olympic Gymnastics Center in Port Orchard, and about a year later the owner asked him to become a partner. They moved to a facility on Naval Avenue in Bremerton in 1987, with Mutchler coaching and his partner handling the business side. Soon after the move, the partner up and left, leaving the whole shebang to Mutchler.

Entrenched in the gymnastics coaching business, Mutchler took a trip in 1989 to Russia with a group studying the former Soviet Union's gymnastic coaches.

“They were so far ahead of us,” says Mutchler. “The whole Russian team was amazing.”

The Russians had perfected the art of coaching by adding a coach for each gymnastics event, and training the best athletes from an early age through high school, college to the Olympics. Mutchler adopted the philosophy.

Forced to move by new property owners, Mutchler moved OGC to Fourth Street in Bremerton from 1991-93, and then to its current location, which was originally built for Frank Perrone, a national champion on the rings from West Bremerton High School who ran the Kitsap County Tucks.

Mutchler received around $100,000 for his share when the North Dakota farm was sold in 1993 and that helped him buy the building from Spencer Horning. He then had a contractor expand the building from 6,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet. Mutchler has since expanded it even further by doing it himself, adding 2,000 square feet of viewing area. The next phase will be to add a 5,000-square-foot building across the street from the current facility.

Many improvements have been made over the years, and now OGC is a busy place with instructors helping gymnasts work their way up the skill ladder.

It’s not been easy for Mutchler, but he is doing something he truly loves. He had help on the business side from younger brother Chris, who died from cancer in November 2020. Chris had his own accounting business and was a CPA.

“I didn’t know a lot about taxes and he would help me deal with them,” says Mutchler, who must multitask, taking care of the business, the coaching and all the remodeling, landscaping and expansion.

“I like to be at the gym,” says Mutchler. “It keeps me busy. They say if you are coaching you never work a day in your life. That’s not true. I run the business, I do all the carpentry work, the landscape ­– I do all the mowing – change all the light bulbs, build things. I save a lot of money by doing stuff myself.”

He, along with a slew of coaches he employs, is developing a reputation with colleges and USA Gymnastics. OGC is sending gymnasts to the national training center, located  in Texas, for USA Gymnastics' Development Camp, some as early as 8 or 10 years old.

The top 300 in the country are inviting to the training center for testing, and that number gets cut to 100. The top 50 go to A Camp, for the higher performers, and the other 50 to B Camp, the second level. Mutchler has sent a gymnast to the training facility every year but one since 2010.

“That is the cream of the crop,” says Mutchler.

Mutchler has some really good coaches working at the center and it allows him to take a breather once in a while, if he wants. What does he do when he does have the time?

Well, fishing and camping are top on his list. Or he can just sit on his property between Crosby and Holly and watch the birds flying by or the sun rising and setting over the cool waters of Hood Canal, or sit by the Tahuya River running through his property or by a pond on it.

Then there is the thought he could just come to the gym and watch his coaches coach and sit back.

In the end, though, he probably won’t stop mowing the lawn or coaching.

“I’ll probably still coach. I still like to help coach,” he says. “Not all the kids get to college for gymnastics. You still want your guy to be a good worker who is working constantly, running their butts off. You got to teach them how to work hard and stay busy, put in a good effort, and make sure you are smart about it.”

The end justifies the means, as Mya Wiley could tell you. Wiley, one of the best gymnasts to come out of OGC and a rising junior at Central Kitsap, is being recruited by all the major gymnastics programs.

Another OGC gymnast, Central Kitsap senior Chelsea Hallinan, has been invited to walk-on at the University of Washington with the possibility of a scholarship in the future.

So it pays to work hard and be part of the OGC culture, and to be coached by Mutchler who knows discipline and hard work can lead to success.

Terry Mosher is a longtime sportswriter and writes regular columns for the Kitsap Sun on local sports personalities. Contact him at bigmosher@msn.com. 

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: The growth of Greg Mutchler's Olympic Gymnastics Center in Silverdale