The No. 4 LSU gymnastics team has historically performed the best on vault and floor. Since 2008, LSU gymnasts have combined for four NCAA vault titles and one floor title.
The premise holds true this year. Senior all-arounder Lloimincia Hall won the Southeastern Conference floor title for the fourth straight year, while senior all-arounder Rheagan Courville and freshman all-arounder Myia Hambrick shared the conference vault title. It was Courville’s second SEC vault title and Hambrick’s first.
“We have always been strong as a team on the leg events,” Courville said. “We have a lot of power, and we do a lot of big tumbling. We really execute it and pay attention to the details of what we are doing. It really pays dividends on those events.”
The Tigers consistently put up big scores on vault and floor throughout the season, while the bars and beam scores fluctuated from week to week.
LSU tallied team scores of 49.400 or better seven times on vault and eight times on floor, while eclipsing that score on bars and beam just three times on each. LSU gymnastics coach D-D Breaux said the Tigers’ inconsistent scores on bars are a result of not having a lineup full of natural bar workers, while she has a surplus of natural vault, beam and floor gymnasts.
“We have a bunch of kids that can tumble, a bunch of leg event people,” Breaux said. “Our beam [lineup] is pretty deep, but bars has been the event that we’ve had to crush and be the most consistent on day-in and day-out.”
The Tigers know they will post high scores on vault and floor, but sophomore all-arounder Ashleigh Gnat said they can’t rely solely on those scores in the postseason. She said LSU will have to perform well on all four events if it wants to compete for the national championship.
“Postseason is definitely an all-around performance,” Gnat said. “We’re trying to improve our scores on every event. Floor and vault are big factors in the scores we’re going to put up in the postseason, but we’re really focusing on everything.”
The key to success on bars is building momentum with high scores early in the lineup, Courville said. The Tigers post a low team score when there are low scores at the beginning of the lineup, making the gymnasts at the back of the lineup focus on the result rather than the process.
Courville said the bars score isn’t a concern when the postseason rolls around because the gymnasts are building confidence on the event with near-perfect routines in training.
“We want to start strong” Courville said. “We want to post a huge bars score because a huge bars score is what we have been training. We train 9.9s all around in the gym. It’s something that we can do in competition. We plan to make that next step.”