Oklahoma gymnastics: Sooner men command league championship
By Chip Rouse
Make room in the Oklahoma gymnastics trophy case for another piece of championship hardware.
There was little doubt going in, and the Sooner men mad sure of it throughout in winning their seventh consecutive Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Gymnastics Championship on Saturday in Colorado Springs.
Oklahoma won the MPSF championship with a team score of 414, nearly 10 points better than second-place Stanford. In addition to a seventh consecutive conference crown, the competitive title was the Sooners 87th straight as a team.
Junior All-American Yul Moldauer still recovering from a recent injury, was the champion of the champions, claiming individual titles in four of the five events as well as the all-around title. The only individual events he failed to prevail in were vault, which was captured by teammate Tanner Justus. and the high bar, won by Yordan Aleksandrov of California.
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The Sooner team scores led the pack in five of the six rotations. Moldauer’s 14.600 winning performance on floor exercise helped propel the Sooners to the team title in that event in their very first rotation and set them up nicely for the rest of the championship.
Oklahoma trailed Air Force by a couple of points after the first rotation and was still behind after the second rotation on pommel horse. .
An exceptional team performance on the still rings, followed up by another outstanding effort on vault quickly advanced the Sooners into the lead and they finished it off with a team title in their final event, the high bar, despite the top individual score recorded by Cal’s Aleksandrov.
In addition to toting off a seventh consecutive MPSF championship trophy, Moldauer was honored as Gymnast of the Year in the conference and OU head coach Mark Williams was named Coach of the Year. Williams has won 18 conference championships since taking over at Oklahoma in 2000.
The Sooners now set their sights on the NCAA Men’s Gymnastics Championships in Chicago, April 20-21, where they will be looking to extend another extraordinary championship streak . Oklahoma will be gunning for a fourth consecutive national title and its eighth in 19 seasons under Williams.