INDIANAPOLIS — The job facing Tom Forster in his third year as high-performance director for the USA Gymnastics women’s program is no different than the challenge that Martha Karolyi dealt with in four Olympic cycles as women’s program director: to win.

Karolyi accomplished that task with team gold medals at two Olympic Games and a handful of world championships. Forster has team golds to show for the last two world championships leading up to the 2020 Olympic Games.

Forster, 60, knows what is expected in Tokyo from the women’s national team, led by four-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles of Spring, that gathered this week in Indianapolis for its first training camp of the Olympic year. He also knows what can happen if the team does not meet expectations.

“I wouldn’t be popular, that’s for sure,” he said. “Like any other coach whose team doesn’t win, they’re looking to replace you. People want to win. The athletes want to win. They don’t work this hard not to win.

“But they don’t want to win at any cost. They want to be valued for their efforts and to feel that they’re being treated well.”

On HoustonChronicle.com: Simone Biles preparing for final year of competition ... maybe

Forster is 20 months into a job that requires him to sustain a dynasty while redefining the relationship between coach and athlete and coach and a federation in cultural and financial turmoil in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal.

Evidence of that cultural change exists on paper, in the form of revamped standards and guidelines, and in geography, with the move of the monthly women’s national team training camps from the secluded Karolyi Ranch in the Sam Houston National Forest south of Huntsville to The Gymnastics Company, a generic 42,000-square-foot warehouse-style building located a couple of freeways and a pair of roundabouts from downtown Indianapolis in Fairfield Township.

The only similarity between the two gyms, based on the offhand comment of a federation staff member, is telephonic: There was a single lamppost on the ranch property at which one could get a decent mobile phone signal and one corner in the rear of the Indianapolis gym where cellular signals are manageable.

The changes, obviously, are more profound. Whereas Nassar had a secluded back room in which he was able to abuse female gymnasts under the guise of medical treatment, therapy stations at the Indianapolis gym are in plain sight in the middle of several layers of vault tables, balance beams, tumbling floors and uneven parallel bars.

“It wasn’t a conscious change, but we like it that way. We didn’t want to create a back room,” Forster said. “There’s accountability, but we also wanted the trainers on the floor all the time so that if there’s an accident, we can handle it right away.”

Among the first to occupy the trainers’ tables Tuesday was Houston gymnast Sophia Butler, who suffered a split toenail when she cracked one of her feet on the uneven bars. Butler sat out most of the initial workout in the new building but is expected to return later in the week.

Butler’s mishap highlights a sometimes-overlooked element of gymnastics that Forster noted in a tour of the gym for reporters as he pointed out different landing surfaces, from foam pits to padded areas to harder surfaces that resemble those used during competition.

He said the variations are necessary because, when gymnasts come to earth after leaps and tumbling passes that they perform dozens of times during a practice, “It hurts.”

“The better the athletes are, the easier they make things look,” Forster said. “But all that means is that they’ve worked harder. It takes a lot of work to make something hard look easy.”

He recalled a tour of the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans in which he was astonished by the rock-hard surface of the stadium’s artificial turf.

“I had watched guys on TV diving to catch a ball, and (the field) was so hard,” he said. “It’s similar to our situation. The longer you’re on hard surfaces, you wear your body down. We try to protect the athletes as much as possible.”

USA Gymnastics has leased the gym for two years with an option for a third, as federation officials still hold out hopes for a new training complex that could handle men’s and women’s artistic gymnastics, trampoline and tumbling and women’s rhythmic gymnastics, with dorms and dining facilities in addition to training space.

Plans for that complex were in the works prior to the Nassar affair, which drove the federation into Chapter 11 bankruptcy while it tries to settle millions of dollars in lawsuits filed against it.

The suits are the subject of mediation, but a permanent complex would seem to be very much on hold while the federation tries to emerge from bankruptcy and from the potential loss of its national governing body status as a result of the abuses that occurred during the regime of former president Steve Penny and Karolyi as national team coordinator.

The Gymnastics Company, however, offers ample space for the dozen or so national team members to work together and separately, both on the domestic equipment used at U.S. meets and the German-made apparatus that is used for international and Olympic competition.

“I don’t believe it’s a permanent home, but it’s going to be home for this year and the next while we try to figure out the next move,” Forster said.

Other changes, however, overshadow matters of equipment and real estate issues.

“I was asked to change the culture of a successful program that was having world success — a dynasty, at that — and doing incredibly well,” Forster said. “It’s been a tremendous challenge but a good challenge and one I think the athletes and coaches have embraced.”

Forster said the tenets of his regime are to act as you would want others to act, to treat people as you would wish to be treated and to reward behavior in such a manner that it will be replicated.

In that vein, the program that for years under the Karolyi regime so fiercely gauged its success by gold medals now also gives out the equivalent of participation trophies — monthly awards that can recognize attitude, sportsmanship and more intangible signs of progress that transcend the pure execution of gymnastics skills.

Key elements of the new wave, Foster said, are whether athletes feel valued and if they feel safe.

There is cautious optimism among athletes about the new regime, even from Biles, who was sharply critical, to the point of tears, a year ago about USA Gymnastics’ inability under the Penny/Karolyi regime to keep its athletes safe and to express their value beyond that of mere performers.

Perhaps new surroundings and new rules and regulations can help produce that sense of value. But that alone won’t be enough, as athletes and coaches know, to meet the aspirations represented by this Olympic year.

“If (athletes) feel they’re valued for their efforts and feel they’re being treated well but they’re not winning, there’s a problem,” Forster said. “If they weren’t winning, there would be a problem in the system, and I would be held responsible for that.”

david.barron@chron.com

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