Regionals brought us basically every possible emotion. We had shock, awe, joy, the bitterest of disappointment, and most of all, if my Twitter timeline is anything to go by, anger. (Please relax with the cherry-picked blurry side-by-side videos and the I’m-not-a-judge-but rescorings of whole meets. I love the energy and scoring is definitely wild, but everyone making these things is doing it out of partisanship or at the very least rage-baiting, and it’s great as long as we take a deep breath and remember that.)
Regionals also means a lot of endings. I was having fun and not thinking about seniors graduating until the very end of the weekend when I suddenly remembered all of them simultaneously and found myself fighting back tears while watching an ABBA routine. We’ve all been there, right?
Lots of material this week. Let’s get into it.
Question: So, who’s actually winning this national championship?
The short version is I think it’s nearly a three-way toss-up.
This postseason has made Florida believers of a lot of people. I’ve said it before, but I genuinely think some of Florida’s scoring adventures of the regular season obfuscated how good the team actually is, which is counterintuitive and very funny. Florida might have the highest ceiling of any team in the country, which means nothing if you lack the ability to dial it in in the important meets as we’ve seen in numerous national finals over the last decade. But the last few meets, particularly that phenomenal round two performance, have been really encouraging.
LSU is the consistent one right now. The Tigers haven’t gone below 198 since February. They looked totally unfazed by some pretty stiff competition both at SECs and in the regional final, and I don’t see any particular reason to worry that that will change. Defending a national title is a different kind of pressure, especially when you’ve never done it before, but the competition is hardly impervious to pressure either. If the Final Four becomes a nerve-off, I like LSU’s chances.
Oklahoma hasn’t been quite the force we’re used to this season, but this is Oklahoma we’re talking about, so a really troubling performance is still like a 197.900. Without feeling particularly consistent, this is definitely the team that’s proving it can make the best out of its off days. There are real reasons to be concerned about fatigue with so many routines loaded into a few athletes, but there’s also a real sense in which we’re overreacting to very small aberrations because we’re just not used to seeing them from this team. Will the ghosts of last year’s semifinal disaster come back to haunt the Sooners? Maybe. Vault landings have definitely not looked super comfortable this year, even though everything else about the rotation remains technically excellent. I’m the least certain about which version of Oklahoma will turn up on the last day of the season, but I do know that there’s a world in which OU is not its very best self and earns the trophy anyway.
Bonus Questions:
What put Michigan State over the edge this year? We’ve seen some extraordinary Spartan teams fall short in the postseason over the past few years. This year, the focus was all there. They didn’t even come into the postseason particularly hot; I was mildly concerned about this team before Big Tens. Then they delivered their three best scores of the season and easily weathered a very serious challenge from Kentucky in the regional final. I wonder whether the pacing strategy was different this season. If so, it worked beautifully.
Which teams might be happy to see the back of the 2025 season? As much fun as this has been, there are some teams that have limped through this season with extensive injury burdens. I fully expect Ohio State to come roaring back next year. Four routines graduating, one transferring, and getting Samara Buchanan, JJ Coleman, Payton Harris, Courtney McCann, and possibly more back? It’s a great deal without even getting into the signing class. But don’t worry, that’s phenomenal too.
2025 had the potential to be revelatory for Penn State, but the Nittany Lions’ consolation prize is a thoroughly battle-tested class of rising sophomores who will be a great complement to returning Ava Piedrahita and Amani Herring. And poor battered Washington might have been the team that dug deepest to fill lineups this year, but help is on the way there, too; it’ll return a deeper team after finding routines in some unexpected places this year.
Comment: Arizona’s emergence this season has been a long time coming.
The perk of being incredibly annoying about recruiting is that sometimes I do see things coming a long time in advance, and I called this one. In February of 2020, when my friends were worrying about Lynnzee Brown’s Achilles, I wouldn’t shut up about how well the Arizona commits were doing during their level 10 seasons. Two Wildcats going to the Nastia Cup that year was a revelation. (Elena Deets and Alysen Fears, if you were wondering.)
It’s been a slow build back from a disappointing end to the 2010s, with lots of little landmarks on the way. Winning the Territorial Cup this year was huge: Arizona hasn’t beaten Arizona State in that regular-season dual since 2016, and to do it in Tempe was an exclamation point on a meet that’s already so intense. And while there was a little luck involved with getting through round two of regionals this year in Seattle, it’s a testament to the kind of team that Arizona has become to have managed to hold its nerve on its weakest event while the energy in the arena shifted so dramatically from moment to moment.
It’s always so nice to see a team play the long game and succeed. Next year will be a big transition, with a lot of key routines graduating, but appearances favor this team and staff being up for the challenge.
Bonus Comments:
Mary McDonough qualifying to nationals is such a wonderful story. Qualifying to nationals as an individual qualifier to regionals is HARD. She’s the only one who did it this year. Many years, nobody at all does. After the pressure she must have felt this year as an underclassman all-arounder on an extremely injured team with a brand new coach trying to hang onto a spot at its home regional, coming away with such a coveted individual accomplishment should feel great and provide a meaningful morale boost to the Huskies moving forward.
Illinois sort of reverted to the mean in the second half of this season. The Illini lost a ton of really important routines in 2024, and I fully expected this season to be a bit of a struggle. Early on, the Illini were suspiciously good, mostly on the power of freshman revelation Chloe Cho. But their last regular season 196-plus was in February, and a pair of forgettable mid-195s at regionals landed them right about where I projected all along in the final rankings.
Concern: Who’s going to miss their senior class the most?
With COVID years coming to an end, a lot of teams are graduating a lot of routines this year. With most teams now done for the season, I’ve been thinking a lot about routines in vs. routines out and who’s going to have the biggest hill to climb next year.
Denver’s a big one. With four out of five of last year’s seniors taking their COVID years, we ended up with a megaclass that contributed about half of the Pioneers’ routines this year. I’m less worried about this one than I once was, with lots of returners stepping up this year; a healthy Cecilia Cooley is a gift, and who predicted Ashley Gallen would become such a staple on beam? Plus, there’s a lot of good material in the incoming freshman class. Still, this is a team that will feel very different next year.
Cal could go a few different ways. Losing Maddie Williams and Mya Lauzon will sting no matter what, and while there are some great routines in the signing class, I don’t know if any of them will be an immediate all-around slam dunk. Ella Cesario has a redshirt year, but Cal athletes seem to rarely take redshirts. If she graduates too, and especially if rumors of a transfer away from Berkeley are true (which I don’t yet believe, but you have to consider such things), then things could look a little tight. I fully expect Ondine Achampong to be in the all-around and crushing it by next January, but she’s still only three added routines. Unless they clone her.. And to be fair, Berkeley is a likelier place than most for that sort of thing to be figured out.
The last team I’ve been thinking about quite a bit is Oregon State. There are some great underclassmen on this team, with Sophia Esposito in particular being an athlete I see as a really key bridge to the future, but a lot of the routines that will graduate this year are really strategically key, and that goes beyond Jade Carey. Though it doesn’t even need to—because how on earth do you replace Jade Carey’s routines? I’d rest a little easier if there had been any freshman routines this year. Like, I’m flexible here, but any number except precisely zero would be so cool.
Bonus Concerns:
Should we have seen this one coming for Georgia? First of all, I realize now that Cecile Landi and Kara Eaker’s beam together is a guarantee of poor construction decisions. But even beyond that, something about this beam meltdown felt so inevitable. Was it echoes of a decade of postseason miseries, or was it the natural endpoint of a team that has been operating at its limits for so much of the season, never settling on lineups, working with many more built-in deductions than its rankings peers and getting away with it by just never really making mistakes?
Does Kentucky have any regrets? No. 10 is right around where Kentucky was projected to land this season, and given that getting to nationals would have taken a 198, there’s a good reason this has been by far the least-litigated regional final. You can’t be too sad about losing to a team that’s peaking like Michigan State is right now. Still, I did feel like there were four tenths of preventable landing errors. It just wasn’t quite the laser focus we’re used to seeing from postseason Kentucky.
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What happened with the coverage of Utah? They had the highest score of the day!!