It’s an embarrassment of riches this season for Florida, a team that returns all of its final competition routines from the 2017 season and now adds four former elites in its freshman class of six.
| FLORIDA 2018 – Returning Routines | |
| VAULT McMurtry – 9.950 Slocum – 9.945 Boren – 9.925 Baker – 9.898 Hundley – 9.850 Chant – 9.831 Alexander – 9.804 Gowey – 9.800 Cheney – 9.750 |
BARS McMurtry – 9.930 Hundley – 9.925 Baker – 9.880 Boren – 9.860 Gowey – 9.850 Chant – 9.820 McLaughlin – 9.800 |
| BEAM McMurtry – 9.925 Boren – 9.900 Gowey – 9.895 Hundley – 9.880 Baker – 9.855 McLaughlin – 9.845 Cheney – 9.735 |
FLOOR Baker – 9.945 Boren – 9.945 Hundley – 9.885 Slocum – 9.870 McMurtry – 9.846 McLaughlin – 9.805 Gowey – 9.700 Chant – 9.338 |
The Gators should not lack choices, so evaluation of the 14ish potential routines this freshman class brings is less about whether they’re good—they are—and more about whether they’re actually going to make it into an already-established Florida lineup this season (or are worth pushing to make that lineup).
Alyssa Baumann
The most famous member of the new class is beam-queen Alyssa Baumann, who made the 2014 world championship team based on her beam prowess, then finished 7th all-around at 2015 and 2016 nationals before having to pull out of the Olympic Trials with an elbow injury. That same injury kept her out of her would-be freshman year at Florida in 2017, with Baumann electing to stay in Texas to rehab her injury before joining Florida this season.
Discussions of Baumann’s contributions must begin with beam, where her grace and flexibility make that event an obvious yes. If anyone should be an NCAA 9.9+ on beam, it’s Baumann. The only real question will be the composition of her routine because she has so many elite-level skills to choose from, but only the most precise of the bunch should be included in NCAA since she needs to be getting 10s.
We won’t see the Arabian in NCAA because there’s literally no point to throwing that kind of risk, but the excellent Onodi has been retained, connecting right into a layout stepout series to show she’s not skimping on the acro series either.
As for the other pieces, Baumann never quite had the difficulty or health to make bars a strength in elite, but she definitely had the line and execution through her toe point and handstands, which should make bars an equal strength to beam for her now that we’re in the land of NCAA composition.
On floor, I’m impressed that Baumann is training a DLO since I had her down as a classic “I get to downgrade my tumbling in NCAA and no one’s going to care because look how pretty my leaps are” nominee. If she can stay healthy doing real tumbling, I’m all for it, though with the depth Florida has, floor and vault are less important events for Baumann. She can get 9.9s on floor, but it’s not as “we’re going to need you to anchor and be the best” as beam will be.
We haven’t seen vaults from Baumann so far in preseason training, and while she had a DTY in elite that was quite nice, she’s not necessarily one I’d pick to retain big vault difficulty in NCAA.