Congratulations to the week 10 champion, Stacie Webb’s beam, the first 10 in Southern Utah history, which beat out Katelyn Ohashi’s beam in second place and Kiana Winston’s beam in third. It was the week of beam.
To the vote for the conference championships, meets that brought us four more 10.000s, all from gymnasts who have already received 10s on those events this season. Be more interesting, humanity. Continue reading Best Routine of Conference Championships Poll→
Congratulations to our week 8 champion, Alex McMurtry’s floor, which used a boost from Team Florida to run away with the title ahead of Hallie Mossett’s floor in second. In an upset, Nicole Lehrmann’s bars 10 outpaced McKenzie Wofford’s bars 10 for the third position by a mere 9 votes.
On to week 9! A week marked by at least one 10 on every event, twelve scores of 9.975 or higher, and thirty-seven scores of 9.950 or higher. Thirty-seven.
Congratulations to our week 6 champion, Peng Peng Lee’s bars, which won by a billion votes to zero. It was a close-run thing for the remaining spots, however, as Rachel Slocum’s vault took second, just two votes ahead of Ali Jackson’s floor, which was just three votes ahead of Alex McMurtry’s bars, itself only two votes ahead of Maggie Nichols’ floor.
Now, to the vote for week 7, in which the highest score given out to any gymnast was 9.875. No, I’m totally kidding, everyone got a 10 obviously.
(Heads up, no nominees from the GymQuarters meet this weekend because that meet is behind a paywall and not all of you can watch the routines, in case you’re wondering why Maggie Nichols isn’t four of the nominees. I think she’ll survive.) Continue reading Best Routine of Week 7 Poll→
Congratulations to our week 2 champion, Britney Ward’s vault, which ran to victory ahead of Peng Peng Lee’s beam in second and Myia Hambrick’s floor in third.
Who will take the title for week 3, a week peppered with 10s and 9.975s? (Usual disclaimer: If you don’t make videos of full routines available, I can’t nominate them. Even if they got 9.975. Cough cough, Pac-12 Network.) Continue reading Best Routine of Week 3 Poll→
Each week, I’ll put up the top routines of the previous weekend and let you guys vote on which routine wins the award for best of the week. Deciding the nominees is up to me (mwahahahaha) and is based on 3) score, 2) overall quality, and 1) which ones are easily available online—aka, which ones have been uploaded by our dear NastiaFan101. Because, you know, we need to be able to see them in order to vote for them. So if you want to vote for Elizabeth Price…get those meets to start taking place in the present day. With color televisions. And the iron horse.
Feel free to use the comments for reasoning and/or write-in votes.
Following last night’s Red Rocks Preview, we understand a lot more about what Utah is planning to say for itself in 2017, so this seems an ideal time to preview lineups and expectations.
This slate of recent results seems fine enough, but aside from 2015’s dramatic second-place finish in the Marsden curtain call, Utah has missed Super Six three of the last four years. That’s a first for the program and one that is far from satisfying. Those 9th-place results in 2016 and 2013 are equal for Utah’s weakest finish in the NCAA era, and while that can be attributed to improvements from other teams as much as anything else, that’s cold comfort for a team like Utah. Utah doesn’t finish 9th.
The Utes have the roster in 2017 to restore how everyone felt a year ago after that 2nd place when THE GOLDEN AGE IS BACK AGAIN HURRAH. At least, Utah should expect to return to Super Six this year. That’s not saying it will be simple. Most top teams are adding routines of the same caliber (it’s the year after the Olympics), but among the teams in that turbid mixture called Borderline Super Six, Utah seems the most likely bet. Continue reading Utah 2017→
FLOOR
Schwab – 9.910
Lewis – 9.900
Merrell – 9.850
Rowe – 9.848
Stover – 9.575
Lee – 9.392
Utah’s granary of routines has been mightily depleted after last season’s graduations and the retirement of Samantha Partyka, but there’s also good news for the Utes: all three of this year’s freshmen are legitimate all-arounders from whom we should expect a significant and plentiful harvest. I don’t have trouble coming up with 6+ viable routines on each event.
The most prominent member of Utah’s accomplished freshman trio is, of course, Photoshop Olympian, Twitter cautionary tale, and interpretive vault pioneer, MyKayla Skinner.
Much has been made of the idea that Skinner won’t be as successful in NCAA because of the built-in form deductions in her gymnastics, but I’m not so sure about that. We’ve seen plenty of people thrive in NCAA with less-than-Pavlovian splits, and frankly her form isn’t all that different from many of the JO gymnasts I’ve been watching these last few weeks. Plus, “tweets dumb things” isn’t a deduction in the code of points, so that doesn’t really have anything to do with what scores she should get.
The composition in NCAA will allow Skinner to get rid of her worst skills, with the added bonus of being able to rely on the old “blind them with difficulty” strategy. Of course, all routines starting from 10.0 are supposed to be evaluated equally…and once you stop laughing we can continue with the rest of the preview.
Blinded By Difficulty absolutely needs to be the approach for Skinner. Her success has always been based on her ability to chuck extremely difficult skills, and downgrading significantly—the way many elites do in NCAA—would only expose problems rather than get her higher scores. As we learned from that “Bali, Mali, Chile, Malawi…it’s a simple do the dance (?)” commercial, Skinner’s DTY is cleaner than her Yurchenko timer. That’s insane, but it’s also true. She needs to retain the big skills, and if she does, I see no reason why she won’t get some of the highest scores in the country, particularly on vault and floor.
So I say vault that DTY.
I’d opt for the DTY over the Yurchenko 1/2-on vaults, purely so that we avoid any and all “DID SHE USE BOTH HANDS?” issues and never have to talk about Skinner being the first gymnast to do an Ono on the vaulting table ever again. It would just be a public service. But we’ll see. Continue reading 2017 Freshman Preview: Utah→
