The No. 18 LSU gymnastics team enters Saturday’s NCAA Regional competition with a chip on its shoulder.
The Tigers, the third seed in the group of six, will be heavy underdogs when they take the floor against top-seeded UCLA, Georgia, North Carolina State, Maryland and West Virginia.
The top two teams will advance to compete at the NCAA Championships in Cleveland on April 15.
“I feel like people are underestimating us and looking at us like we’re an underdog,” said junior Ashley Lee. “But sometimes that’s a good thing because you can sneak up on people who are overlooking you.”
LSU spent the past week working on cleaning up routines instead of trying to increase the number of repetitions in the gym.
But even a decrease in reps could help the snake-bitten Tigers — who have been plagued with injuries all season — to heal.
Freshman Maliah Mathis injured her wrist during practice last week, and while the injury is not expected to keep her out of the lineup this weekend, she did lose some valuable practice time.
“We’ve had some naggy things, some crazy things happening,” said LSU coach D-D Breaux. “Maliah woke up one morning with her wrist swollen, and it looked like she had a spider bite on it, but she banged it in practice one day last week, so we’ve been nursing that for the last week and a half.”
UCLA and Georgia enter the meet having won the previous six national championships — UCLA last season and Georgia the previous five before that — and are currently ranked Nos. 6 and 8, respectively.
Though her team faces a daunting task with two highly ranked teams and the meet being held in Georgia’s home arena in Athens, Ga., Breaux is not putting any extra emphasis on the importance of this meet.
“We’ve tried to not make it any bigger than any other meet or put any unnecessary pressure on the kids,” Breaux said. “I think they’ve been dealing with a lot of pressures, and we just feel like if we have good, positive practices we’re going to have good, positive performances.”
The Tigers may not be the popular pick to advance out of the group rankings-wise, but they enter Saturday confident they can pull the upset.
“At this point we don’t have anything to lose,” Lee said. “I don’t think we’re approaching this with nerves or fear, but we’re excited to get out there and show everyone that this going to be our sweet comeback. And if we can make it to nationals it would just be the cherry on top for all of our hard work this season.”