Odds are high that an SEC team will win the NCAA gymnastics championships. It’s happened nine of the past 10 years.
However, the team that wins Saturday’s SEC Championship meet at the Gwinnett Arena won’t necessarily be the team that wins it all.
Of the past five SEC teams to finish first at the NCAA meet, only one did it after winning the conference meet.
“Parity is a wonderful thing,” LSU coach D.D. Breaux said. “It’s been such a hard-fought season for everyone. Look at the small margins of victory. … It’s a great statement for SEC gymnastics.”
The championship meet Saturday is broken into two sessions, determined by national rankings. The first session starts at 2 p.m. and includes No. 9 Georgia, No. 18 Arkansas, No. 25 Kentucky and unranked Missouri. The second session begins at 6 p.m. and includes No. 2 Florida, No. 3 LSU, No. 5 Alabama and No. 8 Auburn.
“This whole competition, from top to bottom, is going to be separated by very few tenths of points, so everybody is going to have to be good on every routine,” Auburn coach Jeff Graba said. “This meet is a showcase of the best gymnastics in the country.”
In 2014, Alabama finished its last rotation strong and won the SEC meet, but it was Florida that wound up sharing the national championship with Oklahoma. The last team to double up and win both was Alabama in 2011.
Georgia is looking for its first SEC championship since 2008; the Bulldogs didn’t win the conference championship when they won the NCAAs in 2009. That was the most recent of five consecutive national championships for Georgia, which has won it all 10 times. Georgia has won an SEC-best 16 conference championships.
The Bulldogs are coming into the meet with a lot of momentum. The Bulldogs knocked off No. 4 Utah, which had not lost a meet, in Athens on Saturday. Coach Danna Durante hopes her team can get over the hump at the SEC meet, where they haven’t finished better than third in the past five years and were fourth the past two seasons.
“This season has been a great learning process,” Georgia coach Danna Durante said. “We’ve gotten stronger as the season has gone on.”
The Bulldogs have leaned heavily on its freshman and sophomores, which Durante estimated have produced 60 percent of the team’s points. That includes freshman Natalie Vaculik, who had a pair of 9.9s on bars and beam against Utah, and freshman GiGi Marino, who had a 9.925 on floor against the Utes. Other contributors have been sophomores Ashlyn Brousard, Morgan Reynolds and Kiera Brown, and freshmen Viv Babalis.
Georgia has upper-class leadership, too. Seniors Chelsea Davis (fourth all-time on the school’s career bars points list) and Sarah Persinger and juniors Brittany Rogers, Brandie Jay and Mary Beth Box have earned All-American medals.
Durante, in her third season at Georgia, has spent a lot of time this week talking about the mental approach to the SEC championship.
“We’ve spent a lot of time talking about mindset,” Durante said. “I believe we’re headed in the right direction at the right time.”
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