(Ed. Note: This article is about 2 days late. For the record, the SB Nation editing tool was stuck in Atlanta traffic for most of that time. #That’sMyExcuseAndI’mStickinToIt)
Welcome back, Gym Dog fans! In spite of your fearless author’s Munsonesque poor-mouthing in the run-up to the NCAA Regionals, Danna’s Dawgs got the job done, and the results at the Gainesville regional pretty much held true to the rankings.
The Georgia gymnastics team didn’t have their best day, and the judging was pretty tight overall, but tight judging is to be expected at the NCAA meets, and the bar won’t get any lower as the competition progresses. And as I’ll point out shortly, we’ve got a very, very tall mountain to climb from here.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves... let’s talk about this meet.
I must start my coverage by pointing out the good and bad parts of the broadcast feed provided by the University of Florida. (Each regional host institution was in charge of providing their own broadcast coverage.) First, the good: Technically, they did have separate video feeds for each event, and it was available via streaming on the SEC Network+ package at espn3.com. But then, the bad: All of those video feeds were tied into the same screen, so you never were able to see more than 1⁄4 of a screen’s worth of your team. The SEC Championship meet provided a dedicated full-screen live stream for each event, so we know the infrastructure was in place to do this. But instead, the Gators’ athletic department did it on the cheap, combining everything into one feed and reducing your view to a quarter-screen per event.
On top of that, There was only one camera per event, and the camera angles seemed to be pretty much randomly chosen based on “where can we strap up a camera somewhere in the arena.” As a result, you got a caddy-wompus, distant view of bars from a weird angle, a view of the balance beam from about a 45-degree angle, a view of vault from a camera that seemed to be attached to the roof in a corner of the arena, and a view of floor (the one event where a wide view is desirable) from the arena floor, about 3 feet away from the competition space.
Some people were complaining about the lack of having a commentator doing the live stream (the only sound on the feed was the ambient arena noise), but I’m ok with that. It was clear that the SEC Network didn’t provide their technical expertise or their prime broadcast team of Bart Conner and Kathy Johnson Clarke for this event (question: Why?), so UF obviously chose to just provide the feed with the crowd noise instead of throwing up a random commentator to butcher the coverage (as apparently happened at the Lincoln, Nebraska, regional). Given the choice between a bad announcer and no announcer, I’ll take “no announcer” every time.
In fairness, we in the SEC gymnastics world have gotten completely spoiled over the last 2 years by the incredible coverage provided by the SEC Network to women’s gymnastics. The SEC Network team has clearly made it a priority to give women’s gymnastics in the SEC the same quality of coverage that is provided to any other “top tier not named football” sport, like basketball or baseball. They have done an outstanding job of providing incredibly well-produced SEC gym broadcasts with high-quality pictures and high-quality announcing teams.
Before the SEC Network came around, we’d probably have been happy just to have any internet feed of the NCAA regionals at all. But the bar has been raised, and expectations along with them, so I was pretty disappointed at the quality of the fare provided by the University of Florida for this meet.
(Ahem... I hate Florida.)
But enough about making the Gators look bad... they did that for themselves over the first half of the competition. So, let’s get to the rotation-by-rotation recap.
Rotation 1: Vault - 49.325
Morgan Reynolds - 9.825
Gigi Marino - 9.85Beth Roberts - 9.80
Ashlyn Broussard - 9.85
Lauren Johnson - 9.85
Sydney Snead - 9.95
The Gym Dogs started very strong on vault. I thought the scoring was pretty tight, since most of our ladies (Marino being the sole exception) performed the best vault they had put up all season long. I might have been tricked by the incredibly poor camera angle, but that’s the way I saw it.
Even if I was correct, though, tight judging is the norm at NCAA meets. This is now the postseason, and you should come in expecting extremely tight judging. That’s the nature of how this thing works. And to our ladies’ credit, they came in strong in rotation 1 and put up one of their highest vault scores of the year.
One of the most impressive points is that they did this without their All-American freshman phenom, Rachel Dickson. Dickson rolled her ankle during her floor routine in the SEC Championship meet, so her rehab from that injury obviously wasn’t yet at a point where she could compete on all 4 events. We really missed her on the 3 events she didn’t compete (she only went out on bars), and we’ll be hoping that she’s well enough to be back in the lineup at nationals.
Some additional drama started unfolding in this first rotation, as well. Florida began the meet on the uneven bars, and they had to count a fall enroute to a rotation score of 48.975. So after 1 rotation, Danna’s Dawgs had a .350 (three-and-a-half-tenth) lead over the Gators and the rest of the field. It was just about the best possible start you could have scripted for this team.
Rotation 2: BYE
All of the NCAA meets are unique in structure from anything most of these teams have experienced throughout the season, because they introduce bye rotations. Because there are 6 teams at every NCAA regional/semifinal/final, you have a total of 6 rotations in a meet. In every rotation, you’ll have a team competing on every event and 2 teams that have byes. Usually, the byes happen after vault and after beam.
Of course, this affects every team equally, so it doesn’t really provide a competitive advantage for any one team over the other. It’s just a question of how your team reacts to it. And in our case, I’m not sure we reacted to it extremely well, since the bye rotation seemed to kind of kill our momentum from the first rotation.
Rotation 3: Uneven Bars - 49.200
Morgan Reynolds - 9.80
Hayley Sanders - 9.80Lauren Johnson - 9.125
Sydney Snead - 9.85
Rachel Dickson - 9.90
Rachel Schick - 9.85
Rachel Dickson might have only competed in one event in this meet, but she knocked the hell out of the one routine she did. We absolutely needed her 9.90 performance, since the rest of our team was good, but not quite at their best. We had very few stuck dismount landings, far too many missed handstands, and Lauren Johnson missed her release move and fell in the third routine, increasing the pressure on the rest of the team to hit all of their performances.
So, we didn’t hit that 49.300 target that I’ve set for every rotation, but it was pretty close, and thanks to Florida’s subpar beam rotation (49.225), we were still in the lead at halftime of the meet, with a 98.525 score to the Gators’ 98.200. (Mizzou was hanging tight with the Gators at 98.100 at halftime, as well, but they faded as the meet went on.)
Rotation 4: Balance Beam - 49.075
Sabrina Vega - 9.80
Hayley Sanders - 9.775
Morgan Reynolds - 9.775
Ashlyn Broussard - 9.90Vivi Babalis - 9.625
Rachel Schick - 9.825
One word: Ugh.
Ashlyn Broussard came through with a huge 9.90 performance, and we didn’t have any major disasters, though Vivi Babalis made one major mistake that cost her a two-tenths deduction. But other than Broussard, it just looked like the entire team was nervous and a bit tentative. Balance checks abounded, and there were very few stuck dismounts.
After starting so well throughout the first two rotations, we let the bottom fall out here. We didn’t have to count a fall, but even so, a low rotation score like this would likely sink us at the national meet.
In addition, Florida was on floor in this rotation, and they rebounded from their poor start by launching into a 49.450, giving them a lead for the meet that they would not relinquish.
Rotation 5: BYE
Rotation 6: Floor - 49.175
Morgan Reynolds - 9.80
Beth Roberts - 9.80
Vivi Babalis - 9.85
Sabrina Vega - 9.875Sydney Snead - 9.65
Gigi Marino - 9.85
Again: Ugh.
As this season has progressed, floor has regularly been one of our strongest events, which is should be. But tonight... not so much. I don’t know if our performance on the beam rattled us, or if we just didn’t cope well with the bye rotation, or what... but our ladies just weren’t as solid on floor as they needed to be. The routines looked pretty good, but they were full of little missteps and hops on floor pass landings. That kind of thing is what nickel-and-dime’s you into the 9.8 range. And the normally-rock-solid Sydney Snead somehow blew her second floor pass and stepped out of bounds on the landing, which hurt us, too.
The two exceptions were Gigi Marino and Sabrina Vega, who were both significantly shortchanged by the judges, in my opinion. Gigi performed the same level of routine that garnered 9.95 scores four weeks in a row to close out the season, but somehow the judges only saw a 9.85. And Sabrina Vega actually received a 9.95 from one judge, but another judge only gave her a 9.90, and the two Soviet judges only awarded her a 9.85, so she was stuck with a 9.875 overall. (The high and low scores are dropped, and the remaining two scores are averaged.)
All that added up to a significantly subpar 49.175 on floor. For our team, that’s just flat-out not good enough. We can do better, and we should do better.
Conclusion: Georgia Gym Dogs - 196.775 (2nd place, qualified for nationals)
I’ll repeat that last sentence I typed, because it really goes for the whole meet: We can do better, and we should do better.
As a team, we have not yet put together a full meet where we were able to “hit” all 4 events at the same time. We absolutely must do that in the national semifinal meet, or we’ll be going home.
This is due to the fact that we’ve received the most unfortunate draw at nationals that we’ve had in a while. (The national brackets are drawn up when regionals are set so we knew in advance that this was coming, but it wasn’t really relevant until we qualified out of regionals to begin with.)
The national semifinal meet is arranged into two sessions of 6 teams each, and the top 3 teams from each session qualify for the Super Six (national team finals). It’s not the top 6 overall finishers... it’s the top 3 from each session. So, essentially, it doesn’t matter what happens in the other session. You have to defeat at least 4 of your competitors to advance to the Super Six.
And unfortunately, this year all of the SEC teams at nationals were drawn into the same “Group of Death” semifinal session. Here’s what the lineup looks like (final season rank listed in parentheses):
Semifinal I
- Oklahoma (1)
- Utah (4)
- UCLA (6)
- Denver (7)
- Washington (11)
- Oregon State (12)
Semifinal II
- LSU (2)
- Florida (3)
- Michigan (5)
- Alabama (8)
- Georgia (9)
- Nebraska (10)
As you can see, we’ve got a monumental task ahead of us. We are the second-lowest-ranked team in our semifinal session. In order to advance to the Super Six, we have to beat 5th-ranked Michigan and one of the other SEC teams (LSU, Florida, and Bama), none of whom we’ve previously beaten this season. This is our “Group of Death” session.
As for the first semifinal session, only Oklahoma is really guaranteed of advancing. Utah and UCLA are both good teams, but they’ve also both been wildly inconsistent at times, so they’re not locks. The University of Denver, who are having one of their best seasons of all time, could easily pip one of them for the finals slot. Washington and Oregon State are probably both in the “just happy to be here” camp, though.
In spite of the fact that the cards are now stacked against us, though, my expectations for this team have not changed. We have the talent on our roster to compete, and we’ve seen throughout the season that the potential is there for our ladies to put up big scores. Even if we’re still missing Dickson and Vaculik, we just have to put all 4 rotations together at the same time. If we can do that in the semifinals, we can advance to the Super Six. If we have a “down” rotation in any event, we’ll be going home. That’s just the way it’s going to work for us this year. This is when the lights are shining the brightest, so now is the time we need to step up and shine.
The NCAA national semifinal meet will be held in St. Louis, Missouri, on Friday, April 14. UGA’s session (Session II) will start at 8:00 PM Eastern time. The meet will be televised live on ESPNU (as will the first semifinal session, which starts at 1:00 PM Eastern).
Until then...