We’re back! Thank you for your patience with me last week as I missed a whole week of gymnastics while trapped at work and sleeping on the floor during the snowstorm and then subsequently spending like 48 hours unconscious to recover. I’m still not quite sure what happened during week four, but I was here for week five, so let’s discuss that.
Question: Where is this Michigan revival coming from?
Michigan is having a really nice sensible season so far, a far cry from its hapless 2025 self. In fact, this weekend’s narrow loss to Michigan State produced a score that is already better than 2025’s season high. There isn’t an easy answer to why this team got so much better this year. With only three freshman routines most weeks and Reyna Guggino’s injury return—while great, only being the one vault—it seems to mostly just be genuine improvement of the mid-lineup routines.
The exception here is Quincy Walters, who was a very impactful late commitment switch from Cal and provides some desperately needed pizzazz, particularly on floor. But I think most of the credit goes to people like Jahzara Ranger and Sophia Diaz just settling into the season a little faster the second time around. I don’t know if this team has the ceiling to stay in a nationals position forever; it’s hard for me to see where enough regular 9.95+ scores will come from. But this is a really encouraging start.
Bonus Questions:
How long until CaMarah Williams gets a 10? She’s freaking scary. 29.875 over three events this weekend? It’s coming.
Is Rutgers on the way back, or…? After being one of the big winners of the first weekend, Rutgers actually got worse for the next three meets before recovering a bit this weekend at home. Which version of this team are we going to see more of as the season progresses? How serious a regionals contender is it going to turn out to be? And where does Emily Leese keep disappearing to?
Comment: Penn State is a really dangerous sleeper right now.
My projection for Penn State this year was comfortable depth with upside TBD. The current sophomores carried a lot of weight on an extremely injured team last year, producing a ton of 9.8s under a lot of pressure, but not necessarily going a lot higher than that regularly. The injury returners, most notably Ava Piedrahita and Amani Herring, were potentially really valuable but still slight unknowns based on preseason footage. The freshmen had potential but were a bit difficult to project into lineups.
Herring remains an uncertainty, dropping out of lineups after the first week, and the freshmen so far haven’t produced most of their signature routines. But Piedrahita is as good as ever, and those sophomores, exactly as I hoped, are complementing the resilience they learned last year with technical maturation.
The Nittany Lions didn’t get a lot of attention for notching a season high that exceeds the likes of Stanford and Auburn. They also haven’t yet scored below 196 this season. In a Big Ten that for the most part is still in the process of settling into the 2026 season, we should be watching this team more closely.
Bonus Comments:
Penn is at it again. No Skye Kerico, no problem: The Quakers are lurking around the regionals cut and looking really tidy yet again. A few more weeks and I’m sure they’ll be pushing toward 196.
Maryland’s transfers are such a win. The Terps lost a lot of senior routines last year and are getting very few from freshmen. Almost all of the difference has been absorbed by transfers, and it’s going quietly excellently, with two road 196s in the first month of the season. Aine Reade, with that 9.975 on floor last week, is the headline, but most of them are doing really strong work.
Concern: The teams that were supposed to fix themselves after working out the first-meet jitters have not fixed themselves! At all!
It’s difficult to find anything new to say about the titanic struggles that both Kentucky’s and Utah’s seasons are turning out to be. And with the new NQS rules, it will be harder to overcome a start like this than ever before.
Utah missing yet another chance for a great score on home turf this weekend was tough to watch. Worse, for viewers at least, is that so many of the Utes’ mistakes are coming on their most beautiful routines. Sacrificing technique for consistency might be the only road forward—some concessions in this direction have already been made—but that’s certainly not a satisfying or enjoyable direction.
Kentucky finally hit a full meet this weekend, but looked thoroughly workmanlike doing it. Even if the worst of the mental battles is in the past, I just don’t get where all the upside has gone. Only three Wildcat routines not belonging to Delaynee Rodriguez have gone 9.900+ all year. This is still the SEC!
None of these are original thoughts. But whatever is going on with these two has progressed past the point of us being able to pretend it’s not happening.
Bonus Concerns:
Dang it, Washington. The Huskies were looking so good at UCLA this week before counting a fall on beam. Beam started the season so strong!
What happened to George Washington? Kendall Whitman was a generational star, for sure, but I didn’t anticipate the Colonials falling off quite such a steep cliff.
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Article by Rebecca Scally
