Movin' on up to No. 23 ... and looking ahead to a trip to Michigan

By Brice Biggin

Head Coach

We have made a little jump up in the rankings from No. 25 to No. 23.

We are doing it mostly on the road, which is even better. When you are competing well on the road and you can go out and hit 24-for-24, that says a lot about how this team is starting to perform.

Kayla Kosmerl had a very good week for us at Ball State. She had struggling a little bit with being able to hit beam routines in meets, and she had her best beam routine by far. That really helped to spark us and it helped out beam score. 

Kayla had a great weekend, but really we didn’t have anyone who had a bad weekend. Overall we hit 27-of-28 routines counting the exhibition routines. We had one exhibition-routine fall, and that was it.

We are becoming a very consistent team. f you look at a lot of the really good teams like LSU, Florida and Alabama, they go out and compete week in and week out. That’s the expectation if you are going to give yourself a chance to be successful regionally and nationally.

This weekend we go on the road again out of conference at the University of Michigan, and the Wolverines are tough. They are a top-10 team. BYU will be there, too, and they are about where we are. So, that’s two very good teams. It is another opportunity to get a good road score to move us up again. I think we will have to go mid-195. If we do, that will give us a chance to move up. When you get into that top 20-to-23, it’s tough to move up because all of those teams are very good.

We will be competing at Michigan’s Crisler Arena, and we’ve had pretty good success there the last couple of times we were there. We had a meet there in the year we made nationals, and then our regional meet was at Crisler. Obviously we competed well there, and so there are some good vibes that hang out there for this team. Hopefully we can go out and be consistent and steady again.

We are getting healthier. Skyelee Lamano had been ill, but she came back last week, competed and did a good job. Hopefully with another week of practice she will be even more solid. Nicolle Eastman is trying to get back in, but she needs some time. She is getting stronger and closer, but she is not quite there yet. The good thing is that everyone else is stepping up. If she comes back, that’s a big bonus. If not, her teammates are getting the job done.

With our win at Ball State we clinched at least a tie for the Mid-American Conference regular season championship. Two weeks from now we need to beat Bowling Green here at the M.A.C. Center to win the championship outright. That’s an opportunity that means a lot to our team. 

That Thursday, March 6, vs. Bowling Green is also the last opportunity for people to see Marie Case compete at home. If you haven’t seen her compete, you are missing out.

Thoughts on a Gymnastics RPI

CRAIG BALLARD

Assistant Coach

Within our coaches organization, the competition committee is looking at everything, whether it is postseason, or we do our regular-season meets, or anything to improve our sport.

We thought the way basketball handles their postseason using RPI and the selection committee was pretty interesting, so we decided to take a look at creating an RPI for gymnastics and see how it comes out.

We are tinkering with an RPI based around winning percentage. It is calculated where 25 percent is your winning percentage, 50 percent is your opponents winning percentage and the other 25 percent is the winning percentage of your opponents opponents. It is all based on how you do and who you compete against.

The metric came out this season, and right now we are No. 6.

Here’s a look at the entire top 10:

1. Florida
2. Alabama
3. UCLA
4. Utah
5. Oklahoma
6. Kent State
7. Nebraska
8. Rutgers
9. Minnesota
10. Michigan

The next Mid-American Conference team is Central Michigan at No. 13.

Florida at No. 1 is the team everyone considers to be the best country right now.

I like the idea of having an RPI. I think it is another thing we for us to look at the sport. I think sometimes fans get confused by the numbers, the 195s and 196s, and stuff like that. This relates to a basketball fan who can say “oh, that’s their power index.” Maybe it will draw some more fans in and help people understand the sport a little bit more.

I also like that it makes winning and losing important. Sometimes gymnastics fans get confused when a team says it had a really good day, but then it lost to everybody.

Whatever happens on that gym on that day also becomes more important than who was judging it. Let’s say we go someplace far away and it is a low-scoring meet where we still win. If both teams are scored low, it is still great. We get our win point, and it takes a little bit of the judging out of it and puts it more in our hands.

While I like the RPI, I think we can tweak the formula a little bit because the actual No. 1 team in the country this week is LSU and the RPI has them at 11th. Maybe there needs to be a little tweaking there, but I still like it. It adds to our sport.

In this week's actual rankings, we moved up from No. 25 to No. 23 with our win at Ball State.

Here's some video from that victory:

Reflections on a thrilling win at Central Michigan

By Brice Biggin

Head coach

We learned this weekend that we have kids with a lot of heart. 

Our team has been a bit down and out this year with injuries and illness,  and then we had a kid come down with pneumonia and another get in a car accident right before our meet at Central Michigan. We scrambled for a lineup and had to add some kids in who had never done what they did before this past weekend.

We were outgunned coming in. There is no doubt about it. Central Michigan is a very good team and we respect that. But our kids showed a tremendous amount of heart with the ability to not give in to the crowd or to the moment. We couldn’t be more proud of them and more proud of the victory.

When you look at faces, they don’t usually lie. You can see fear. You can see doubt. You can see lack of confidence in the way an athlete stares at you or talks to you. I didn’t see any of that this weekend. 

As we were warming up on beam, which was our last event, Central Michigan was creeping back into it quickly. They had some fans in the front few rows who were doing some heckling. I talked to the team and said “listen, we are not going to be able to hold your hand through this. It is time to grow up now. You are going to face situations like this when you have a crowd that may not be the most polite and is trying to do things to get you off of your game. The only way to handle that is to go out and make routines. If you do that, it’ll take care of everything.”

I saw all of our kids nod their heads.

I don’t pull a lot of punches with our kids. They know I am very honest. Marie Case was up last for us and I told her very simply – “the season is on you right now. You need to go out and make this routine. If you want to win a regular-season championship, you have to make a routine.”

She got this little smile on her face. I told her I didn’t care which routine she does. She can either do a back handspring layout-stepout or a back handspring layout-stepout layout-stepout, which is very difficult and more than she needed to do. But that’s Marie.

Marie has such a strong belief in herself because of the way she trains. She trains harder than anyone else and with more consistency than anyone else. She has a fierce determination that she is not going to fail. She is not going to let anyone else down or herself down. She is one of those rare individuals who has such an intensity about her that I’m going to cry the day she leaves. It is going to be impossible to replace her.

It rubs off. I think when Marie’s teammates watch her compete the way she does it builds confidence and it settles down people. Beam is a tough event, and to finish on it in a venue like that and in that kind of setting was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever seen a team do.

There were some other special moments.

Our first bar routine went up and had a major mistake right at the end of her routine. She was in a good routine and had about three steps in her landing. We started out with a 9.55 which is not a good score. That had me worried. Our next kid up, Amiah Mims, had only competed on bars once all year. She has a really nice routine, but it has been a little inconsistent.

When Amiah went to do her release, she was a little far from the bar. When she turned, she reached, and I mean she reached with a purpose that there was no way she was coming off of the bar. That was one of the key things that really started the whole ball rolling for us. Not only did she get back to the bar on her release, but she has struggled with her double layout dismount, and she did it beautifully and stuck the landing. It jumped the scores up and the next kids relaxed a bit and went out and did their job. That was a key spot for us because if she made a mistake, things could have turned everything completely the other way.

Another moment that sticks out for me was on vault. The girl who made the mistake on bars earlier, Kelsey Lawless, was also in the vault lineup for the first time doing a new vault. We needed her, and she did a great job. I told her before that she owed us one. She knew. She accepted it and she did a fantastic job of doing a big vault when we needed it.

When Central Michigan made some mistakes on bars that hurt them. They needed to play catchup and they just ran out of time. 

After the win we stayed at No. 25, but this away score is going to help us. If we can have another good away score this weekend at Ball State, I think we can jump up a little bit. We have some good teams right in front of us like Central Michigan, Ohio State, Washington and North Carolina State. 

These away scores are a premium because you have to count three of them. If you are a really good home team, but you can’t compete on the road, you are not going to be very successful. That’s why we’ve really pushed being consistent on the road. This win at Central Michigan set us up both for the rankings and the regular-season championship. We still have a lot of work for that, too. We are enjoying the moment now, but come Tuesday when we get back into practice we have to bust our butts because we have another step we need to take if we want to win a regular-season championship.

Flip For Cure A Springboard Into Road Swing

By Brice Biggin

Head Coach

It energizes the girls any time we get a crowd like we did last week for the Flip For The Cure.

We needed a big meet, and hopefully it gives us something to look forward to. It’ll be interesting to see what happens the next time we are home March 6 vs. Bowling Green. That will be on a Thursday because the Mid-American Conference Wrestling Championships are that weekend at the M.A.C. Center. 

I’m not sure what competing on a Thursday will do to our attendance because we have a lot of families and kids who come to see us. Will they come out on a Thursday? We are hoping they do.

The Flip For The Cure was a fantastic crowd, and I am very happy that we are getting such great support for the cause. To get that type of crowd here also says a lot about our program, too. Attendance right now for us is very good.

We had two weeks to prepare for the meet with Northern Illinois and we saw the benefit of the work we put in during that time. We had the best performance of the season on beam, and we spent a lot of time on that and hopefully our athletes take some confidence from that performance.

We are gone now for the next three weeks, and they will have to produce like that on the road if we are going to be a good team. We have obviously our biggest test of the year coming up at Central Michigan this weekend, so we need to be able to go out there, relax and be confident.

We’ll find out a little bit this week from our trainer about where Olivia Trout is with her injury. She has been battling an injury for the last two weeks and hasn’t been able to do much of anything. Even if she is healthy this week, I don’t know if she will get enough time in and the repetitions she needs to compete. The good news is we have really had kids step up and fill in spots in the lineup. They’ve just done a great job. It has been kind of a M.A.S.H. unit for us with small injuries that just keep coming. But because of that we’ve been tested and we’ve found answers with kids stepping in and doing the job.

With this weekend, we know Central Michigan is a very good team that has competed well all season long. We have to understand that we go down there focusing on ourselves as a team. We can’t worry about them. Our focus has to be 100 percent on ourselves and how we perform. If we can start out very steady like we did this week, we’ll be fine. We started on bars, and that has been a pretty good event for us. It’s nice to start on an event you feel comfortable with. Those kids have done a very good job. If we start off well on there, then go do some good vaults and keep ourselves right in the meet, then anything can happen in the last two events. 

This is another meet and another MAC team and another score we are looking for to help in our regional ranking. We are 25th in the nation right now and that’s good. If we can stay right around that top 25 and put a couple of good away scores up there, that will help us. They take the top 36, and as long as we stay in that top 36 we’ll be ok. We would like to stay somewhere in the top 28, and that’s a realistic goal for this team.