Monthly Archives: September 2018

NCAA News

The Miss Val Show

23 Comments

Miss Val hates gymnastics.

At least, that’s what people will tell you. Including Miss Val herself sometimes. She loves coaching. She loves heaping piles of life lessons and perspective upon unsuspecting 18-year-old elites who have never seen outside their own grips before. But watch gymnastics recreationally? She’d rather take a calculus test at a gum-chewing convention.

Perhaps that’s why it didn’t come as an inordinate shock today when Valorie Kondos Field announced that she will retire at the end of the 2019 season, after 29 years as the head coach of UCLA gymnastics. She has seemed to be moving in that direction for a while now, and…I mean…she hates gymnastics anyway, right?

Well…we’ll get to that.

If there can be just one defining characteristic of Miss Val’s UCLA, it’s THE SHOW. It has always been about THE SHOW. For better and for worse.

For better, UCLA is exceptionally conscious of how it presents itself to the world as a team, both gymnastically and non-gymnastically. If you go to UCLA, you’re going to be made into a performer, and you’re going to do a floor routine where you engage in battle with a heroin-addicted cocktail waitress only to learn that the cocktail waitress was you the whole time, whether you like it or not. You’re going to be mandatorily entertaining and kind of weird. It’s intrinsic in UCLA’s identity.

It’s no coincidence, then, that UCLA is typically the favorite team of international gymnerds who don’t even like NCAA (or claim not to), and the favorite team of olde-tyme purists who believe that nothing useful has happened in the world post-Mostepanova.

There’s something quite throwback about UCLA when it walks onto the floor. It’s very put together. You certainly won’t see an insane rat’s nest of a bun or a sloppy temp tattoo slapped on the cheek. A grizzled old 1970s Soviet coach would find the fewest things to murder about the UCLA team. That put-together, pristinely presented identity is pure Miss Val, and it extends to the routine performances themselves. There’s a refined sureness. Dare I even say…the calm confidence to do big beautiful gymnastics?

(It’s the Miss Val retirement post. I couldn’t possibly resist.) Continue reading The Miss Val Show →

Stuff and Nonsense

Things Are Happening – September 19, 2018

37 Comments

A. US men’s selection camp

The two-day selection camp for the US men’s world championship squad begins tomorrow. And guess what. It will be streamed! Like a real competition! Well done, you.

It’s almost like getting more eyes on what you’re doing is a…dare I say it…good thing? And that it…helps promote the sport and the athletes competing? WHAT. The women’s program is like, “I don’t understand…”

Competition schedule
Thursday, September 20 – 11:00am local time (Mountain)
Saturday, September 22 – 3:30pm local time (Mountain)

The competition is limited to just the 8 members of the training squad—Mikulak, Moldauer, Modi, Kimble, Yoder, Bower, Van Wicklen, Howard—who will be divided into the 5 team members and 3 alternates following Saturday’s competition.

The big news is the withdrawal of Donothan Bailey due to injury—because he was just casually having a great year, with his best chance ever to make a worlds team. Ah ha ha. Dead.

Bailey’s replacement is Trevor Howard, who I suppose is here because of the potential 14.5 score he brings on rings. OK? That’s interesting to me because I wasn’t too, too worried about rings. If you have Mikulak, Kimble, and Moldauer, that’s not a terrible rings score by any means, so perhaps Howard’s selection is revealing of more rings anxiety (or more Kimble anxiety) than I thought there would be.

The Bailey withdrawal is the best news for Modi and Bower since it means they have less competition for those remaining couple spots. Based on the scores from nationals, the teams produced by swapping in and out Bailey, Modi, and Bower (and Van Wicklen for that matter) were so similar that only the smallest margin was going to separate who made the team and who didn’t.

Above all, Marvin Kimble is the major story to watch at this selection camp because he missed nationals. That means we don’t really know what we’re going to get from him—in addition to it being Marvin Kimble to begin with, so of course we don’t know what we’re going to get from him. His high bar routines will be the most important of the entire selection competition because that’s such a weak event for the US right now and because he can potentially bring nearly a full point over what a non-Kimble team would score there. Stay tuned.

B. is for Britain and also Becky

Lots to report on the British side of things today. At the team championships, the big development was the performance of this unknown upstart named Becky Downie, who won bars with a 6.6 D score, the highest in the world.

She’s so confident with all those impossible releases that the most significant challenge for her in this yeti of a routine will be getting the endurance back to avoid having to cast at horizontal as she gets toward the end. Put together, this set could challenge Derwael and would make Downie a medal favorite at worlds once again.

Not to be overshadowed, Ellie Downie also made her return at this competition (Becky’s like, “NO MY SHOW”). Ellie missed on bars for a 13.3, which nonetheless put her in second, but also scored 13.3 for a hit on beam with a not-pushing-it 5.0 D, good enough for third. Let your British-team anxiety be quelled. A little.

Amelie Morgan also continued her assault on our prognostications for next year (when she becomes senior) by placing in the top 3 on every single event, including winning beam. We also saw Alice Kinsella take second on beam and vault, Taeja James win floor comfortably with a 13.550, and Kelly Simm win vault with 14.050 (tied with Kinsella overall but higher on execution). Continue reading Things Are Happening – September 19, 2018 →

Elite Things

Pan American Championships – What Happened There?

11 Comments

The US team is what happened there, to the surprise of no one.

On the women’s side, the United States won the team title by five and a half points over a valiant Brazilian team, and was never truly challenged in the process, winning each event.

Brazil won’t really mind the 5+ point deficit to the US—that’s about what we would expect to see right now between Brazil and a B+ US squad—and that team final performance showed marked improvement over qualification, where the margin between the two teams ended up a surprisingly hefty nine points.

In qualification, it was vault of all things that did Brazil in after DTY disasters from both Saraiva and Barbosa, but the team resolved those problems for the final to buoy the final score. That improvement, coupled with a few more mistakes from the US side in the final, shrunk the margin to five points.

Digging deeper, the world championship candidates on the US team all pretty much did their jobs, helping us resolve nothing at all. Thanks a lot. We needed to see Kara Eaker win beam and hit two routines that scored well into the 14s, which she did. We needed to see Grace McCallum win the all-around and continue proving she has a usable, international-level score on any event as needed, which she did. We needed to see Jade Carey be a force on vault and floor and win those pieces, which she did, and while Carey did not as yet upgrade the DTY, the big and necessary floor score sort of made up for that and didn’t compromise her current position.

What’s difficult here is the scoring standard. Scoring looked pretty loose to me, a little looser than US nationals, with the judges far more willing to go into the mid-8s in E score than I expect we’ll see at worlds. So, it doesn’t give us a great point of comparison. Are Grace McCallum’s beam and floor routines actually higher-scoring than Morgan Hurd’s, as this meet would lead us to believe? I’m not sold on that.

McCallum nonetheless did help her world championships case with this performance, solidifying herself as the US’s #4 all-arounder with believable, TF-ready routines on three events. Continue reading Pan American Championships – What Happened There? →

Stuff and Nonsense

Things Are Happening – September 13, 2018

7 Comments

A. This weekend

We’ll start with the fun stuff—competitions. The Pan American Championships will run from Friday to Sunday, with a preview of the women’s competition and full schedule here. This will be the last official competition opportunity for the large majority of the teams until worlds—and a critical case-making meet for some of the borderline American, Brazilian, and Canadian contenders. 

Germany will hold an internal test on Saturday to begin making its own worlds team decisions, the women hoping to find a solution to…whatever that was at Euros. That solution is probably named Elisabeth Seitz. She’ll return to competition here, none too soon for Germany’s sake, performing alongside Schäfer, Bui, Voss, and the usual suspects. Sophie Scheder is not competing.

Women are at 1pm local, the men at 4:30pm local. If you are avoiding-geoblocking savvy, there will be a live stream.

The following weekend, we’ll get back into the World Challenge Cups swing, with Szombathely, followed by Paris. Both Downies are on the list for Paris. The entire nation of Great Britain breathes a sigh of relief.

B. The awful stuff

The latest news from the land of crime—Erika Davis filed suit against That Guy saying that he drugged and raped her in 1992. And it was videotaped. She told her coach. The coach got a copy of the tape. Then the athletic director named George Perles, still a trustee at Michigan State (“but why aren’t the trustees holding anyone responsible?!?!?!”), forced the coach to turn over the tape, resign, and sign an NDA. 

You should go to prison! And YOU should go to prison! EVERYONE should go to prison!

“How could he have gotten away with it for so long?” they asked.

“Why didn’t the victims come forward sooner?” they asked.

There’s always a George. Looking out for a Larry. 

C. Raschilla to Auburn

We were all wondering what would happen to Bryan Raschilla after he got dumped by Alabama. Well, turns out he will be Auburn’s new volunteer assistant coach in the upcoming season. Because he’s just so green and needed to gain some valuable experience in a volunteer position.

Suzanne, always a trendsetter.

Guys, anyone who’s anyone has an insanely overqualified volunteer assistant coach on staff now. Four for the price of three!

Anyway, my All-Volunteer-Assistant coaching staff of Suzanne Yoculan, Bryan Raschilla, Jordyn Wieber, and Courtney McCool will coach you to all the national championships. Continue reading Things Are Happening – September 13, 2018 →