As the home team rotates to its last event of the meet, the crowd starts to cheer in anticipation of floor. The crowd brings the energy for the home team gymnasts to feed on as they dance and tumble their way through 90-second routines. The energy that the last rotation brings, can also carry an assumption that floor is each team’s best event. While that can be the case, each team in the NCAA tends to have a different strength. The teams in the EAGL are no different, but is there a commonality in the strengths of these teams?
Gymnasts in the EAGL conference can get lost in the shuffle when fans are watching teams in the Power Five. One piece that is noticeable has been some of the strong bar workers, from Mara Titarsolej, who became the first gymnast from LIU to be name a regular season All-American to Lali Dekanoidze, who has scored three 9.975s in the first six weeks of the season.
Below is the current average and rank on each event for each team in the EAGL as well as their average.
One thing to note when looking at these scores as averages is that the averages include some outliers from early in the season. New Hampshire has been consistent scoring in the mid 48s to low 49s on bars since the first meet where the Wildcats only scored a 47.500. Pittsburgh has a similar outlier where in Week 2 the Panthers scored a 47.525 on beam while all other beam totals are above 48.900. N.C. State had a rough outing on bars this past Friday where the Wolfpack only scored 47.450 while not having scored below 48.950 the previous five weeks. Before this past week N.C. State was ranked 22nd in the country on bars with a 49.060 average.
While it’s not the case for every team, when looking at the conference as a whole, bars come out on top in ranking and in an extremely close second on average. This season bars has been that highlight event for each team in the EAGL, but what about in the past? Going back to 2019, LIU had not yet formed a program, and Temple was competing as a member of the ECAC. The following tables are the same format as this season except NQS was used rather than the average to show both the team strength and conference strength.
As the 2023 season continues and NQS will start to be used, we will have to wait and see how the scores shake out to see if bars has taken over as the best event for the EAGL once again
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Article by Alyssa Van Auker
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