With championship season approaching, both Iowa gymnastics teams need to hone their mentality.
By Taylor McNitt
Coming out of a confidence-boosting spring break and looking forward to upcoming championships, Iowa gymnastics can pin its early shortcomings and recent successes to one key aspect of the sport: mentality.
“You have to feel comfortable in what you’re doing to know that you can go the next notch up to get the details,” said women’s gymnastics head coach Larissa Libby. “You can’t be worrying about whether this gymnastics is hard for you — you can only be thinking about how it’s easy so you can take it up to another level.”
Both the women’s and the men’s squads struggled to solidify their routines by the time competition rolled around, and it showed.
A clear example was the number of falls the men’s team counted early on in the season. The women, likewise, have struggled with being timid.
“We have a lot of new people in the lineups, so that’s a difficult thing for us to get over,” Libby said. “It’s taking us this long to solidify who’s going in and making that stable. Which, again, works against us when your philosophy is, ‘Consistency is everything.’ ”
The teams each only have four seniors in the lineups. Otherwise, the teams are made up of relatively young athletes still getting their feet beneath them.
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“Our captains have come in, our seniors, in a really incredible way,” said men’s gymnastics head coach JD Reive. “There’s a pure amount of pressure, and support at the same time, for those guys to show up and do what they need to do in practice. [They] get the underclassmen to understand that what we do in here is what we can expect on weekends. The weekends are not magic. There’s nothing that occurs on weekends that doesn’t happen here in training.”
When talking about seniors who pave the way for underclassmen, for the men, two come to mind.
Senior Dylan Ellsworth, one of the leading gymnasts on the team in the statistics, is one of them.
“[A good mindset is] something that most athletes learn,” Ellsworth said. “Most of our seniors and older guys do pretty well, so the younger guys need to understand that when the pressure’s on, that’s when you need to hit. We’re trying to teach that when the pressure’s on, you’ve got to hit; you can’t fall. [You need to be] able to do your routine when you’re tired and when you feel really well [to] hit it under no circumstances.”
The practice and example piece is necessary for the development of the athletes. The way training is presented is a big part of the picture, as well as repetition, analysis, and tight interactions among teammates and coaches.
Senior Mark Springett takes this a step further.
He likes to shape the mindset even as the meets are underway by easily being the loudest one on the floor.
“You’ll see me kind of just goofing off,” Springett said. “[We asked,] ‘What can we do beyond just practicing our routines to change the atmosphere of competition?’ And one of those things is definitely making sure we stay tight as a team, as group. Not worrying about what other teams are doing, not focusing on the scores, not being caught up in the team totals. Just doing the events, cheering each other on, and then move on to the next one — just take it one by one.”
With championship season approaching, both teams need to take what they’ve established and keep the ball rolling. As long as they relax and focus on the details, Hawkeyes might just unthink their way to the top.