Despite changes in lineups and injuries for the No. 2 LSU gymnastics team, the Tigers have been consistent in all of their meets.
The Tigers have scored at least 197 in the first four meets of the season for the first time in school history.
LSU ranks as the No. 1 team on vault and No. 4 on beam, which LSU coach D-D Breaux said is important to controlling meets.
“I always feel like the team that wins beam and controls beam has a really good chance of controlling the meet,” Breaux said of the rankings. “It can make you or break you if you don’t do well there.”
Perhaps the biggest component in LSU’s success is the level of difficulty. The team is always striving to perfect its routines and hit all its marks.
“There’s always room for improvement, and we talk about that a lot,” sophomore all-arounder Lexie Priessman said. “You can always get that extra tenth here and there, no matter what event it is. Toes pointed straight and all those little details at the end really matter.”
In NCAA gymnastics, the judges’ scores are decided by both difficulty of the routine and its execution. There is a minimum set of requirements in order for a gymnast to have a 10.0 start value, and the judges make deductions from there.
Floor, beam and bars all start at 10.0 value if the gymnast meets all the requirements, but with vault, the gymnast needs to hit bonus connections in order to have the 10.0 start value.
Gymnasts who add a one-and-a-half to their vault have a 10.0 start value, unlike those who do a full.
“Most teams do start at a 10.0 on bars, beam and floor, especially the top teams that you’re going to go against,” junior all-arounder Myia Hambrick said. “Vault is the main event where there can be a difference, and I think for us, if we can play up six 10.0 vaults, that’s [going to] give us an advantage by about two-tenths — depending on the team.”
Once the team got into its comfort zone this season, everything became about moving forward with a “high level of excellence,” Breaux said.
From this point forward, everything is about perfecting routines and not holding back.
“I think we have the most difficulty as a team overall,” Priessman said. “We watch our performances, and we have the skill level that some people don’t have; starting passes with double layouts and full layouts. But at the end, it doesn’t matter about the difficulty; it matters about the execution.”
Every person on the team is working toward trying to perfect that one-and-a-half vault and extra tenth of a point. It is a collaborative effort between the coaches and the players.
“It’s comforting to understand that whoever goes is going to get you a good score,” Hambrick said. “Now we’re just working on small things to make sure that we can get every single tenth that we can get, and that they can’t take anything from us because what we did was perfect.”