This season is starting to develop a rhythm. I saw Stanford on the ACC weekly awards graphics and didn’t even panic a little. The early season absentees are starting to either return or declare the reasons for being out, so we at least know what we’re dealing with. Here are my quandaries, reflections, and disquietudes as we try, and likely fail, to assemble some early season narratives.
Question: What does the next gear look like for Missouri?
Nobody worked harder in the offseason than the Missouri coaches. The talent on this roster is stunning, but it’s also a very old team. If nationals doesn’t happen this year, the plan to get there next year will have to look quite different without the likes of Jocelyn Moore and Mara Titarsolej.
Given the brevity of this window of opportunity, No. 11 isn’t quite where Mizzou would like to be. There’s no need to panic about that, though: January rankings don’t matter, and there’s plenty of time to start producing the kind of scores that will take it to Fort Worth. I’m just curious about what changes we’ll see over the next few weeks to start improving.
The key pieces of vault and floor are in place, with the possible exception of Elise Tisler on vault. It’s just landings there, and this is a team that you expect to be a little bit bouncy in the early weeks. A couple of the most useful beam workers sustained preseason injuries so depth isn’t infinite, but we’ve already seen some variation in that lineup. I wonder if there are any alternative bar routines working their way up the rotation? Railey Jackson and Kaia Tanskanen both have potential on that event. It’s also possible that we’ll just see execution start to click more without any big lineup changes, but I do envision bars and beam in their current forms having a slightly lower scoring ceiling.
Bonus Questions:
Is Rutgers… good? No coach, no problem, apparently. Maybe the coach was the problem? It would also be really nice to have Emily Leese, but the Scarlet Knights might be fine without her. I’ll grant you that being a consistent 194 team won’t keep anyone in regionals contention as the season progresses, but after so many years of not being a consistent anything team, I hope Rutgers is enjoying this moment.
Remember when stick items were actually fun? Stanford’s recent stick content (which is definitely still fun) has made me think about the days of every team seeming to have something fun and creative for sticks. There’s also an element of stick item inflation: I’ve seen them given out for routines with falls now, which is really not the vibe. I’m glad that Stanford is keeping it special, and I miss seeing more of that.
Comment: Utah had to be the main character this weekend.
I know it was a double-meet weekend, but come on. It wasn’t necessary for there to be this much drama.
The first meet would have been plenty. A comprehensive victory to open its Big 12 conference slate, its first 197-plus of the season, that devastating Avery Neff injury, and Ella Zirbes’ apparently anxiety-related shortness-of-breath episodes on floor is more than enough events for a weekend! But, apparently, the Utes were worried we were bored, so on Monday we got The Scoring, scoring discourse, the team being messy on main, discourse about that too, Sarah Krump doing floor, Camie Winger doing the all-around, Makenna Smith T-2 all-around score of the season…? I guess it was a holiday weekend, so most people had time to digest all that. Personally, I was working a night shift, so I’m still going through it.
Bonus Comments:
Georgia is crushing bars. When UGA debuted at No. 2 on bars last week, my response was basically “what an entertaining early season ranking quirk!” This week was even better. I still don’t know what’s happening on the other three events or whether I should be happy about them, but there’s at least one thing going well.
After a great start, it was one to forget for Alabama. I was really impressed by the Tide’s opening meet and meant to discuss it last week but ran out of space and planned to bump it to this week. Now, after watching it wilt under pressure against Kentucky, I can’t do that anymore. I’m hoping for some different lineup choices from Alabama next week, but there’s definitely a lot to like about this team, like Kylee Kvamme’s awesome vault.
Concern: There are too many conference awards now.
This is the one thing I’m a cantankerous grandma about. It’s getting ridiculous. You get one gymnast of the week. One rookie. One specialist. Ties can be fun occasionally, but there should at least be some kind of tiebreak procedure that has to fail for a tie to stand. The gymnast and rookie awardees don’t need to be an all-arounder, but the specialist should be someone who doesn’t regularly compete the all-around. And it’s allowed to have more to do with narratives and significance than overall score.
I really hoped the death of the MRGC would mean the death of its horrible event specialist award model, where the top scorers on each event are given the weekly awards. Instead, the Mountain West has somehow made it worse. EIGHT of you? You’re all very lovely and good at the sport, but really.
Plus, we’ve got conferences just inventing awards now. What’s a rookie specialist of the week? That’s not a thing.
The Big Ten has always liked ties a little too much, but the addition of two new teams seems to be exacerbating that tendency. Only a few conferences are still sensible about this. Thank you, SEC.
I don’t mean to be anti-fun. I’d be all for it if it actually seemed like anybody cared, but they don’t, and it’s not consistent with how the same conferences run things for other sports. I just don’t see the point.
Bonus Concerns:
Is it over for West Virginia? After nine consecutive years at regionals, last year’s poor showing could have been a one-off, especially with five three-star recruits and a grad transfer coming in. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. This team’s collapse has been sad and baffling, and while important athletes have certainly left over the last few years, this isn’t just a personnel issue.
Does Washington have a road back this year? This year was always going to be tough. Jessa Hansen Parker inherited a team with a small freshman class that would have been OK given Skylar Killough-Wilhelm’s anticipated return but then didn’t have time to recruit after her decision to transfer. Since then, our access to injury information has been limited, but the list of absences is brutal: Deiah Moody and Thu Nguyen haven’t been seen doing gymnastics all year, freshman Jessica Reith and senior Emily Pires aren’t dressed out at meets, and preseason heavy hitters Kristin Lin and Lilly Tubbs were both absent to start the season, with Lin returning this week just on bars. There’s absolutely no flex left on this roster and a number of athletes have commendably stepped up to fill lineups that are not their strengths. Consistency definitely might improve, and I don’t know which injured athletes might make it back before the end of the season, but right now regionals feels like a long shot. The bright side is that I really like the work that Hansen Parker’s team did to assemble a signing class on a tight timeline. The best outcome for this year might be a good foundation laid for next year.
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Article by Rebecca Scally
