This weekend, neither Iowa gymnastics team will be in the Hawkeye State.
The GymHawks will head to Champaign, Illinois for the Big Ten Championships, marking the official end of regular season.
“This is our championship meet, and we are the night session, so that’s really exciting,” said junior Nicole Chow. “It will be on podium, so that will be a little different. But I think we’re really ready for this meet; we’ve been building on every meet so far.”
Session 2, the night session, has six teams competing: Iowa, No. 7 Michigan, No. 23 Minnesota, No. 4 Ohio State, Illinois, and Maryland.
Earlier in the afternoon, during the first session, the other four teams — No. 14 Nebraska, Penn State, Rutgers, and Michigan State — will compete.
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“I like Big Ten [Championships] — there are a lot of good teams there,” senior Lanie Snyder said. “It’s fun to see all the Big Ten teams finally get together in one big arena.”
Snyder is right about the competition; a lot of teams, according to the rankings, are better than Iowa. But the regular season might suggest otherwise.
Of the nine teams, Iowa has come out on top against six of them. The only three who have yet to be beaten by Iowa are No. 7 Michigan, No. 14 Nebraska, and Illinois.
In order to pull off the ultimate upset, the GymHawks have taken preparations to the next level.
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“We put our beam out on the spring floor this week, so we’ve got a bouncy beam; it makes us adapt,” Snyder said. “We’ve been practicing on that, so when it comes time to compete on a regular beam, it’s going to be so easy for us. We’ve been running our lineups at practice, so just running down one at a time is going to make the competition so much easier once we get there.”
The men are finishing their regular season. The last meet, however, isn’t against any new opponents.
“Going into Nebraska this weekend is going to be a great chance for us to prove that we can compete with these other teams outside of Carver,” said senior Mark Springett. “It’s going to be a great chance to showcase exactly what we’re capable of. Last weekend, when we went up against Minnesota, we had the highest score in the Big Ten. Minnesota will be [in Nebraska], too, so it’ll be nice to kick their butts again.”
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Upsetting then-No. 6 Minnesota over spring break was huge for the Hawkeyes, and the victory snapped the Gophers’ five-meet winning streak over the Hawkeyes. Minnesota has since jumped to No. 3, however.
Nebraska is ranked at No. 4. Iowa sits at No. 9.
“[This is a] really important competition this weekend,” said men’s gymnastics head coach JD Reive. “We are coming off some really good momentum and some quality and consistency, and we need to go out and do that again as a group. It’s going to be a tough one — it’s Senior Night for Nebraska, [and] everybody’s ready to go, which should make for an exciting competition. We’ve done a lot of routines with the bye weekend — they’re prepared, physically. If we get in there with the same states of mind we’ve had these last two weekends, we expect the same kind of success.”