By Brice Biggin 

Head Coach

Even though we were disappointed with second, I felt like the team did about the best it could. We had one fall on beam and one fall on floor. But for the most part we looked confident and I thought we competed well.

It was a meet where some of the scoring was frustrating at times across the board. When you look at scores across the country, the big complaint from most coaches is consistency. I think a lot of coaches were disappointed in the fact that this meet is really important and it doesn’t start to get real tight. There were some teams that were severely affected by some of the scoring. Luckily we were in a position where it didn’t affect us, but there were some teams that took nothing out of the meet and were displaced from regionals because of the tight scoring.

That’s the way it is sometimes, but it was pretty frustrating.

Overall, I have no complaints about our team. Our season went as well as could be expected. We had a lot of kids step up and get valuable experience when others were injured and hurt. This team competed as a true team all year long.

With this past weekend at the MAC Championships, I don’t think we can say that Marie Case surprised us, but winning the all-around by over half of a point is completely unheard of. She was at 39.5 and the next closest was at 38-something. It was a phenomenal farewell to Mid-American Conference competition for her. Gymnast of the Year and Senior of the Year were well-deserved honors for her. She was just fantastic.

The Pete Maravich Assembly Center
at Louisiana State University

I thought Jordan Hardison as a freshman competed well for us on three events and got some great experience. Rebecca Osmer, for her first year coming in for us as a transfer, tied for second on bars with a fantastic routine. Jaymi Baxter had a great championship meet in her first experience after last year sitting out with an injury from the previous season.

We had people step up all year and they all showed up at the championship and performed.

Next up for us is the NCAA Baton Rouge Regional hosted by LSU on April 5 at the Maravich Center.

We are excited to go to Baton Route, with the great location and gymnastics fans down there. We’ve been there before and we were treated well, so we are ready to go.

It is going to be a great competition with the teams that are out there – LSU, Auburn, Stanford, Arizona and Iowa State.

It is going to be a situation that we need to go out there and do our best to get either the team or someone to advance on to the NCAA Championships April 18-20 in Birmingham, Ala.

On to Ypsilanti for the MAC Championships

By Brice Biggin
Head coach

We closed our season at the University of Pittsburgh on March 15. While we finished second, we feel like we performed well enough to win the meet. We hit 24 out of 24 routines, but unfortunately we left a couple of little things out there right at the end. We didn’t win, but we were very pleased with the teams performance and how we carried ourselves.

It isn’t easy to refocus after an emotional meet like the one we had a week earlier when we secured the Mid-American Conference regular-season championship against Bowling Green in our last home meet. We struggled a little bit in warmups at Pittsburgh. They just kind of looked like they were going through the motions, so we had a little talk to refocus before the meet. We talked about how last week was high emotion, how it was senior night and the regular-season championship. But now that’s over with. We still have other things we have to accomplish starting today.

To the credit of our athletes, they proved us wrong. You love to see that. It’s fun. After not looking great in warm ups, they responded great.

Now we move on to the Mid-American Conference Championships in Ypsilanti, Mich. 

We’ve talked a lot about not putting anything extra into this meet. If we start trying harder, then we can struggle. This team has done well taking it one meet at a time and not working any different because it is a bigger meet. We have to still go out and do our same routines. Let’s just go out and be consistent.

Gymnastics isn’t like other sports where you may want to pump yourself up. If you go out there too pumped up, you usually screw up. That adrenalin in our sport is sometimes not a good thing. 

In preparation for going to Ypsilanti, we will take things down to a bare minimum. We will often have kids working on different events even if they will not be competing in all of them. Now we take out all of the extras. We’ll get them working on a couple of routines on each event every day and get them out a little earlier than normal. After practicing Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday will be a travel day for us. Friday will be a warm-up out there and then Saturday is the competition.

To win we will have to go out and hit our routines and stick the dismounts. There are lots of little tenths you can gain or lose by sticking landings on bars, beam and vault. Probably the team that sticks the most will be the team that wins. It’s something we will focus on a little more this week even though we talk about it all the time. You can do a great routine, but yet when you take a step on the dismount, you are starting from a tenth lower than everyone else. Those teams that stick, after five kids they basically count a fall by not sticking a landing. 

Here is a look back at some of our routines from last week's meet at Pittsburgh:

Refocused with an eye on a MAC regular-season title

By Brice Biggin

Head coach

Going to the University of Michigan’s Crisler Arena this past weekend got us into the setting of a big arena, which is something we are going to have to learn how to deal with when we go to the NCAA regionals. All of those regional sites are big facilities.

We have no idea where we will go for the regionals. I could be any one of six spots.

I think we haven’t really had a bad meet all year until this trip to Michigan. That’s something of a positive, in that you never want to perform poorly, but this may give us a little wake-up call. We need to take what happened in Michigan and realize that we are at the end of the season and we need to focus as a team on what is important and how we need focus as a team to be successful. We are going to use that as a positive leading into Thursday’s meet with Bowling Green when the girls know what is at stake.

We have a chance to win a regular-season Mid-American Conference championship on senior night on our own floor. We have to defend our home. We don’t want anyone to come in here and spoil this opportunity. But we have to do a better job as an entire team. 

What has made this team successful is having everyone everyone step up week in and week out. I told the girls that I didn’t think some of them could look at each other and honestly say they gave 100 percent. That has to be refocused.

It’s a short week, so we are doing some things differently. We gave the team Saturday off. Then we came in Sunday and practiced. We’ll practice Monday and Tuesday and then Wednesday we will be off. It’s not a great week, but we will still get three solid days of practice. Yesterday was a good workout and we need to focus on being consistent these next few days so that we will be consistent again on Thursday.

We’ll see right from the first event on Thursday if we have refocused. Vault is an event we did well on in Michigan, but it is still an event where we are trying to figure out one or two kids to add in to solidify that event. I think if we have one or two kids step up, that will show us we are ready to compete.

Senior Marie Case will compete for
the last time at the M.A.C. Center
on Thursday vs. Bowling Green

Freshman Jordan Hardison is a young lady who struggled early in the season. She had a bad vault in the Blue & Gold meet and suffered an injury. But she has really stepped up her game and has come back with a vengeance. She has competed great for us on beam and floor. We pushed her very hard on vault yesterday and talked to her about how this is an event she is capable of doing. She needs to be able to concentrate on it like any other event and do what she is capable of to help the team out. To her credit she has worked her tail off.

Another freshman, Skyelee Lamano, is a girl who has been in and out and is working hard to come back from an injury she suffered last year on vault. That has been a bit of a mental comeback trail for her and she is doing better and better. We need her to continue to step forward and give us a good option as well.

Kelsey Lawless is a junior who has competed for us the last few weeks, and while she hasn’t been as consistent as we would like her to in the spot, she has been able to come through. 

Right now we need two of those three to step up and give us two good vaults. If they do it is really going to help this team out.

Again, this is our senior meet. The last time Nikki Moore, Ashley Transue and Marie Case will perform at the M.A.C. Center. They have had good careers here, and obviously Marie Case has been a cornerstone for the last three and a half years. Losing her is going to be tough.

Marie is starting to understand and get that feeling that she is getting close to the end of her college career. As focused as she is, she needs to have a great last meet. For us to be as successful as we need to be, she has to be the leader of the team. She can’t let emotions run into having any type of slip. I don’t expect her to slip. We are going to ride her as long as we can, and we will hope these seniors are sent out the right way in this last meet and of course in the MAC championship.