Hometown: Ridgewood

USA Gymnastics President and CEO, Li Li Leung, has some advice for youngsters, especially young women. 

“Don’t be afraid to take calculated risks,” Leung says. “Dreams do come true. They really do. Not being afraid to take risks is really important, because if I if I didn’t take that leap in the first place – going to China, which was scary – I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

The inspiring story of the 48-year-old Leung, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, but was raised in New Jersey after moving to Ridgewood with her family when she was three-years-old, follows.

“I went to Ridgewood High School for one year,” Leung says. “And I have a twin sister, May May, who did gymnastics as well. After we completed one year at Ridgewood High, our family picked up and moved to Parsippany, and that’s where we completed our high school days. We moved because we could be closer to the gym and train twice a day.”

Leung is the only member of her family who is not a professor. Her brother, Ming, teaches out in California, her dad, CK, was a professor at William Paterson University, and her mom, Lin, and sister teach in New York City. “Growing up in Ridgewood was idyllic,” she says of her childhood. “It was an incredible childhood, and I’m so grateful in terms of the childhood that my parents were able to provide for us. I look back very fondly on my childhood, and a lot of it was gymnastics-focused, but I was able to have I would say a relatively balanced childhood in terms of gymnastics, and also being able to go to school and just enjoy what the town of Ridgewood had to offer.”

Leung took up gymnastics at the age of seven – and prior, in a way. Li Li and May May would practice their raw gymnastics skills in the most convenient spot: on the couches and other furniture in the Leung home. “My parents would walk in the kitchen, and they’d see us hanging from the kitchen counter and cabinets,” Leung recalls with a laugh. “I think they said, ‘We need to get the kids out of the house.” The furniture was spared, however. “The sport I would say was just really ingrained in us in early age. We were bouncy kids, I guess, and so my parents put us in the sport at that age. We loved the sport. It is an aesthetically stunning sport.”

At age 15, Leung took part in the junior Pan American Games and finished third in the youth division. The humble Leung, however, prefers to focus on the team triumph. “What was more memorable in the Pan American Games was not the individual finish, but was the Team USA finish. We actually won the team competition, and that to me is more memorable because of the fact that it was a team competition and that we were an underdog, and that it was an absolutely incredible experience.”

After high school, Leung attended the University of Michigan. While a Wolverine gymnast, the team won the Big Ten conference title four times, an she was named a three-time Academic All-Big Ten gymnast, and graduated the institution with a BA in Psychology. “Michigan was fantastic,” Leung states happily. “My sister and I attended Michigan, we were recruited together, and transitioning to being an NCAA gymnast is really quite different. When my sister and I were training in New Jersey, we were training 35 hours a week. It was literally a full-time job, essentially. And then, when you go to university and collegiate world, it’s no longer a ‘full time job,’ and you cannot train beyond 20 hours. You’re there as a student athlete. The student always come before the athlete, and our coach made sure that we were all doing well in school. The camaraderie and the experience at Michigan were fantastic, and I still keep in touch with my Michigan teammates today. They’re lifelong friends of mine, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything. Michigan did a fantastic job of setting you up not only in terms of having a fantastic athletic experience, but also a fantastic academic experience. And the spirit on campus is incredible as well.”

Afterwards, she attained Science in Sports Management and Business Administration masters degrees from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Amherst at Massachusetts, and while at that school was also a volunteer gymnastics coach. Prior to graduating, Leung made a key decision which would change her life and ready her for the future in a big way.

UMass allowed Leung to create a 6-credit course where she would go oversees and do a sports analysis in China.  “The sporting industry is very competitive,” she says, “and I could see that when I was in school. I saw that I would be able to gain a lot more experience if I went overseas, especially with Beijing hosting the 2008 Olympic Games, because then I knew that the sporting industry would take off in China, with the Olympic Games as an anchor.” During a spring break, she headed overseas to and traveled through China during the SARS outbreak. “I traveled from north to south China and interviewed a bunch of people in the sporting industry to do this extra independent study, and especially since the university allowed me to do that, that also allowed me to network and it helped me get my job in China as well. It’s a credit to university for giving a student a chance to develop their own educational programming and run with it.”

After school she moved to China in 2004 and started working at Zhou Marketing. “Zhou had the NFL (National Football League) as a client, so we were helping the NFL move into China, and they had Reebok as a client, and that was when Reebok was the official outfitter of NBA, and they also had sponsored Yao Ming (former Houston Rockets center), so I got to work on the first ever NBA game in China in ’04.” Her toiling and overall experience was extremely valuable, especially with her dream as well to work with the Olympics. It led to her opening a Beijing office for and being named Managing Director of Helios Partners, a global sports management firm, in 2005. “70 to 80% of their business is Olympic-related,” Leung explains,  “and I jumped at that opportunity.” In that role, Major League Baseball (MLB) came on as a client, and China hosted its first ever MLB game. Thereafter, Helios worked with both the Women’s Tennis Association and London’s Arsenal Football Club, encouraging both to the Far East. “Just some incredible opportunities were given to me, which I’m so grateful for.” Leung remained in China for six and a half years, and then moved to London to open a Helios office there, just in time for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

After being overseas for over a decade, both Leung’s family as well as her husband’s (Christopher Smits, who is from Michigan) wondered when the couple would return to United States soil. “They were missing us and we were missing them, too,” Leung says. “When we embarked on this international journey, originally we said, ‘Anywhere from six months to two years,’ and 10 years flew by, and we knew it was time to move back to the US.” The year was 2015.

In March of 2019, after serving as a Vice-President of the NBA, Leung was named President and CEO of USA Gymnastics, which prior to her arrival had been rocked by scandal. “It has been an incredible opportunity to lead this organization,” Leung says. “And of course, I took this role with eyes wide open in that there were a lot of issues this organization was facing at the time. This opportunity has been almost in a way that I have come full circle in my life, because I started gymnastics when I was seven years old, and in my many years training in and being involved in the sport, I learned so much in the sport that has set me up for where I am now in life and in my journey here as well. This is an incredible opportunity and it is the opportunity of a lifetime, because this position has the ability to positively impact children for generations to come.” In her current position, Leung helped establish in 2020 the USA Gymnastics Bill of Rights. “This was a way to kind of pay it forward to the sport in terms of the sport that has given me so much in my life and so much opportunity. There’s no question that it’s been a challenging few years, but we have managed to make pretty big strides in terms of changing the subculture of the sport, which will continue. This is an ongoing effort. We now are an organization that is focused on really helping our athletes develop in a holistic manner. It’s no longer about just developing technically superior gymnasts in the gym. It’s about, ‘How do we utilize the sport to set our athletes up for success beyond the sport, and in life?’ We’ve reset our mission, our focus, and our value system. We’re about safety, we’re about accountability, and transparency is a valuable thing to our community that we serve. We’re making great strides, but we’re still on a journey to get to where we want to go. This is an ongoing process.”

In addition to the above, Leung in October 2020 was voted vice chair of the NGB Council of U.S. Olympic sport governing bodies, and last fall was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Gymnastics Federation.

Li Li Leung’s philosophy in life is to continually expand her comfort zone. “That’s one reason why I physically took myself out of a comfortable situation and moved myself to China, because I knew I’d expand my comfort zone. I continually do that in my life, and that is one thing that I hope I never stop doing. If I stop doing that, I stop living.”