On Friday evening, Iowa’s women’s gymnastics team went to Illinois to take on the Fighting Illini, and the men stayed back at Carver for the Fighting Illini on Saturday. Neither Iowa team emerged victorious.
The men kicked off their event with relatively strong scores throughout their first couple of rotations, but Illinois’ scores were just a little bit stronger, so the Hawkeyes spent much of the match trying to close the gap. Always close, they made it to their last rotation but couldn’t pull through — three falls on the high bar doomed their scores.
“We cannot count that many falls — we’ve been saying that every weekend, and we still counted a bunch,” said men’s gymnastics head coach JD Rieve. “But at the same time, we improved upon a number of routines and event scores that we were looking to this weekend.”
Rieve is right; the men recorded a number of season bests, including the overall team score of 401.850.
According to senior captain Austin Hodges, the key to improving the score further is just the little things.
“We still need to do more routines just to get more consistent,” he said. “Sticking the landings and just attention to details — we’re still getting stupid deductions that we shouldn’t be.”
Highlights for the men include eight individual season-best and career-high scores, and both of Iowa’s All-Around competitors took first and second place over Illinois’ competitor.
The men have a lot to work on, but a lot to be proud of, too.
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For the women, the story is similar, but just a little more heartbreaking. The final team scores Friday evening ended up being 195.325-195.150 —just a 0.175-point difference – with the Fighting Illini just edging the Hawkeyes.
Despite falling a little short, the women have a number of things to count as victories.
Six Iowa gymnasts recorded nine new season highs, and three of those gymnasts also recorded career highs. Three GymHawks earned event titles.
These victories are nice for the women, but starting off with weak scores compared with Illinois hurt their ability to win.
The GymHawks started out on uneven bars and followed that up with the vault, both of which weren’t quite where they needed to be. These may have set them back, but Iowa rallied to record good scores on the floor and a season-high score for the beam.
“I could not be more proud of the ‘come from behind effort’ of our team,” said women’s gymnastics head coach Larissa Libby. “While this wasn’t our best start, but it was certainly one of our best finishes, and that will prove to be important in the learning process as we move forward.”