Five-star freshman Charlotte Booth brings international experience with Team Great Britain to Auburn
Here's the story of how Charlotte Booth made the long journey to Olympic alternate, and how that experience is sure to help her in her college career.
Charlotte Booth had her bags all packed for a quick trip to England.
It would just be a week. She’d been invited to a short, one-week training camp by Team Great Britain, just for some of the depth pieces on the Team GB roster to work on some upgrades while the Olympians started their prep for Paris in another camp, the main camp, over five weeks. She was in the side camp, the development one, but she was still excited about it and was glad to be invited.
She was headed to one more practice stateside on a Friday morning, set to fly out on Saturday, and that’s when her mom got an email.
“I barely was done reading the letter, thinking, ‘What is this?’” Erin Booth recalls. “‘She’s now made an Olympic alternate’?” Then her phone started pinging with texts telling her it was important she checked her email right away — and then the words on the screen started to register:
Charlotte had just been promoted.
Charlotte Booth had her bags all packed for a quick trip to England.
It would just be a week. She’d been invited to a short, one-week training camp by Team Great Britain, just for some of the depth pieces on the Team GB roster to work on some upgrades while the Olympians started their prep for Paris in another camp, the main camp, over five weeks. She was in the side camp, the development one, but she was still excited about it and was glad to be invited.
She was headed to one more practice stateside on a Friday morning, set to fly out on Saturday, and that’s when her mom got an email.
“I barely was done reading the letter, thinking, ‘What is this?’” Erin Booth recalls. “‘She’s now made an Olympic alternate’?” Then her phone started pinging with texts telling her it was important she checked her email right away — and then the words on the screen started to register:
Charlotte had just been promoted.
Just like that, she was an alternate for the 2024 Paris Olympics with Team GB.
“It was just an upgrade camp, just to work on your skills, that kind of thing,” Charlotte recalled last week, now on campus at Auburn getting set to start her freshman season with the Tigers. “So that’s what I was preparing for, and someone actually got injured. And so then, I remember it was the last day before I was supposed to be going overseas and I got a call from my mom, and she was, like, shocked. She was like, ‘You’re an Olympic alternate.’ And I was like, ‘No way.’
“And she was like, ‘Yeah.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’m not ready!’” she laughed.
When she got back from practice, the family ripped open her suitcases and re-packed everything to get her packed for five weeks instead of one.
Going to Olympic camp, or making Olympics alternate, were never even on the radar for Charlotte when she started competing for Britain. Her big goal — her only goal, her dream — was to get an international assignment.
Training with the Olympians was something above and beyond. Later that weekend, there she was, at Lilleshaw in England training with the United Kingdom’s best.
“She was on her way to practice and when she returned we just had to re-pack everything instead of for just a national training camp, which would have been one week, for five weeks,” Erin said. “It was a quick turnaround but super exciting and shocking and yeah, it was wonderful. Surreal.”
🇬🇧 Team Great Britain at the 2024 Paris Olympics
Alice Kinsella
Becky Downie
Georgia-Mae Fenton
Ruby Evans
Abigail Martin
Alternate: Rubey Stacey
Alternate: Charlotte Booth
Charlotte and the Auburn gymnastic team start their season Friday against NC State. Charlotte is a freshman who signed with the Tigers in the class of 2025 as a five-star prospect, as rated by College Gym News.
It’s the next step in a gymnastics journey that led Charlotte overseas and around the world — and started one day when she was six years old swimming at a local pool.
“Basically someone saw her in a pool horsing around with my husband doing flips, and came up to me and sat next to me and said they had been at the Olympic level for gymnastics and that we needed to put her into gymnastics immediately,” Erin recalls.
They were right. Charlotte rocketed through the gymnastics ranks, competing at nearby Brandy Johnson’s Gymnastics Academy in Orlando, passing through multiple levels in a year and even skipping levels outright until she was level 10 and finally elite — at 11 years old.
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“Within five years, she went from nothing to elite,” Erin said. “It went so fast that we almost didn’t understand the potential or where it was going to lead us. I didn’t even know how to keep up or what was next. Before we knew it she made elite when she was 11 years old and then the next year she’s on the U.S. team, and she did that for a couple years, and then we went into this British journey. It went very, very fast. It was quite a journey.”
Yes, in senior elite with the United States, Charlotte competed with the country’s best in major domestic events, winning bronze on bars at the U.S. Classic in 2022 and silver on bars at the Winter Cup in 2023.
But Charlotte still had that dream of making an international assignment, and she was determined to make it happen — even if it meant traveling far and wide to make it a reality.
Making the jump
Just like her dad Mark was part of Charlotte being seen that day at the pool when he was throwing her around in the water, he was the key again to Charlotte taking the next step: Mark is English, and was born in England, making Charlotte and all her siblings English-American with dual citizenship.
“My goal in gymnastics with elite was always to travel and compete internationally, and get international assignments, which is something that I always wanted to do. I wasn’t really getting a lot of opportunities for the U.S. — which, I was so grateful to be a part of both teams, but I think that to reach my goal, I think the switch was necessary and it definitely worked out,” Charlotte explains now.
The International Gymnastics Federation approved her designation change in May 2024.
She joined the Park Wrekin Gymnastics Club in Telford. Charlotte braced herself for negative comments or for potentially like an outsider there, but the club at Park Wrekin welcomed her with open arms. “The culture was so different there,” she explained. “Just meeting all-new people was super different for me. But it was great, and they were super supportive.
“My first meet was definitely nerve-wracking, seeing familiar faces, you kind of know them, you kind of don’t; kind of a little bit of tension. But the first meet was fun. I did pretty well. I was definitely nervous, pretty shaky. But I was just happy to get my first meet done with.”
Then she went to Wales for the Welsh Championship — and that’s where things took off. Charlotte won silver on bars, silver on vault, made top-10 on floor and finished sixth in the all-around. “I kind of met some friends and it was more fun,” she said of that meet. “I do well when I’m having more fun and kind of let loose — and the first one I was kind of just really scared, just because it’s the unknown.”
With those fears conquered, she was well on her way to earning those Team GB camp invites and, ultimately, that Olympic alternate designation. She went to Paris with her mom, and even though she had to stay separate from the main Olympic roster as an alternate, in case a contagious virus went through the team or anything like that, she got to enjoy Paris with her mom and have her own Olympic experience.
Oh, and that wasn’t all: Next, she realized that dream she long held, picking up international assignments to represent Team GB in international competition.
She won gold for Team GB on bars at the Szombathely Challenge Cup in October 2024 and picked up bronze on beam. She then won silver on bars at the Cottbus World Cup in February 2025 in Germany.
🇬🇧 Charlotte Booth international medals
2024 Szombathely Challenge Cup | 🥇 | Gold | Bars
2024 Szombathely Challenge Cup | 🥉 | Bronze | Beam
2025 Cottbus World Cup | 🥈 | Silver | Bars
“I think what we were most proud of,” Erin said, “wasn’t the fact that she got to go train there, or medals, or assignments — it was that the Olympic director said that she had made such a positive impact to the culture British gymnastics and that Olympic team, that they would never forget her, or something along that line, which was absolutely incredible. And I think for me and my husband, the proudest moment, just being able to watch her, you know, excel at gymnastics, but also be such a positive member of that team.”
To the Plains
Back when Charlotte rocketed her way up to level 10 at 11 years old at Brandy Johnson’s in Orlando, there was only one other athlete at the gym competing at that level — a girl five years older than her. She was Payton Smith, and a couple years later she’d go to Auburn, competing for the Tigers in 2021 and 2022.
“She was kind of like my big sister … We grew up together,” Charlotte said. “And she committed to Auburn. And Auburn has been coming to my gym since I was probably in fourth grade.
“I kind of grew up visiting Payton in Auburn, so I was already pretty familiar with that. So I’ve always loved Auburn, since a young age.”
Erin explained: “She became Charlotte’s sort of mentor. They were the only level 10s on the entire team at Brandy Johnson’s, so there was a lot of travel together. Charlotte learned so much from Payton. She learned how to compete, handle nerves, stay positive throughout and just enjoy the journey.”
Charlotte in her recruitment eventually took five visits, all of them in the SEC, but ultimately signed with the Tigers.
“Going into it, I definitely was the most familiar with Auburn, but I kept an open mind with recruiting and just getting to get the full experience visiting each and every school that I went to. And coming down to Auburn, it just felt so welcoming,” Charlotte said. “I really loved everything about it, whereas some schools, you know, this is good but this isn’t, and Auburn I feel like is an ‘everything school,’ and I just feel like a place where I could grow both as a gymnast and a person, which is something that I value a lot.”
As for Auburn, head coach Jeff Graba is hopeful that international experience with Team GB helps Charlotte settle into her college career.
The scoring system is completely different in international competition as compared to the NCAA’s scoring system — but that off-the-floor experience for an athlete, going out on their own without their parents for five weeks and training with a new team with new coaches, makes for good preparation for college before doing it all again as a freshman.
“I hope it brings that there’s another gear,” Graba also said. “A lot of the gymnasts have another gear, and some of the people who’ve competed a lot at a high level have had to access that gear a lot. … It matters how many times you’ve challenged yourself at a high level in front of other people — and not necessarily about success and failure; it’s about being willing to put yourself out there.”
Graba reiterated that it’s different scoring and a different sport in NCAA — a difference that even Suni Lee took a few meets to get used to. “Once you figure the game out, I think you can use those things as tools in order to improve your odds for success,” he said. “I’m hoping she figures the game out in the month of January and then shows the other freshmen that there’s another gear they can access, and what’s possible when you do access that other gear.”
After winning silver on bars at the Cottbus World Cup last February in Germany, Charlotte ruptured her Achilles in the floor finals the next night. She is still working her way back to 100-percent but in Auburn’s preseason Preview Meet intrasquad in December, she performed on floor, bars and beam.
Charlotte already planned to turn her attention to college and has called that Achilles injury the end of her elite and international career.
“I’m just so grateful to have been able to have that experience,” Charlotte said. “I mean, it’s definitely something unique that a lot of people don’t get to do. So it was definitely fun. And, you know, I definitely had some of the best memories of my gymnastics career from going to Great Britain and getting to experience traveling and competing internationally with a new team, and it was just so fun getting to meet new girls and coaches along the way.”
At the time, Charlotte had only one coach from the time she was six years old to 17. She picked everything up to leave her comfort zone and went across an ocean to practice in a new gym, with new coaches, in a new country — to take on the world.
“She knew that she always wanted that international experience, and to continue her journey, and this allowed her to do it,” Erin said of switching to Team GB. “So she was willing to make any sacrifice to achieve that goal. And she’s tenacious, and she’s well-adjusted, or well-rounded, and so all her positive attributes help her in those unfamiliar surroundings, right? And so, yeah, of course there was a little bit of anxiety but overall she knows, and we know, it was the best decision she could have ever made.”
Yes, she took on the world. Next, she takes on the SEC.