Marquee Meet
[16] Missouri @ [10] Georgia
Friday – 7:00pm ET – SEC Network
It was kind of difficult to choose a marquee meet for this opening weekend (you know, that very important classification) because, among the SEC slate, we have the four traditional powers—Florida, LSU, Georgia, Alabama—each in separate dual meets they’ll be expected to win. Elsewhere, Utah and Oklahoma will be major favorites in their competitions, so it’s quite possible we could have six straightforward and predictable results. And yet, it’s the first meet of a truly bonkers year and there are many unanswered questions, like who’s out with COVID. Or, I mean, who’s injured, or which freshmen are for real and which ones aren’t. Many, many reasons not to be confident about what we’ll end up seeing this weekend. But anyway, I went with the one where I’m most interested in seeing who ends up in these lineups.
In 2021, Georgia’s highest priority will be actually figuring out bars, so I’ll be hyper-focused on how that six shapes up during the first meet. Theoretically, things should get better, but the team will need to see freshmen like Victoria Nguyen come through with competition-ready routines, and Marissa Oakley maintain her health long enough to lead that lineup. Another season of cobbling together a lineup of people who’d rather not be doing bars will lead to Georgia fighting to stay in the top half of the SEC once again. Also Victoria Nguyen. College debut. A thing. Interesting. Watch.
Georgia’s released tentative lineups include Nguyen on everything but beam (I have 16 questions) and include Emily Schild on both bars and beam. That’s a potential boon for Georgia as her injury history had made me, shall we say, skeptical that we would see her again. I notice a disturbing lack of Rachael Lukacs in the lineups below.
Missouri will be without Helen Hu this season, which forces a lineup reshuffle. During the showcase about a month ago, Missouri showed just three scored vaults. There are several obvious vaulters on the roster who were not part of that three and I assume will be vaulting now, a month later, but how Missouri fills out a vault and bars lineup of six will be worth following. Kyra Burns is a potentially significant freshman who did not compete at that showcase and would be expected to make it into both lineups normally. Do expect to see at least a couple events from Jena Swanson and Amaya Marshall.
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