Oklahoma gymnastics: Big weekend ahead for top-ranked Sooners
By Chip Rouse
This is a huge weekend for Oklahoma gymnastics.
Both the Sooner men and women head into the NCAA Championships as reigning national champions and as the No. 1 seed in their respective championships.
Led by juniors Yul Moldauer and Levi Anderson, the men will be competing at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago, where they will go up against No. 4 Illinois, the host school, No. 5 Ohio State and No. 8 Penn State, all out of the Big Ten, and No. 12 California in one of the two preliminary sessions.
The top-seeded Sooners completed their fourth consecutive undefeated regular season in 2018. They have not lost since finishing as runner-up in the 2014 NCAA Men’s Gymnastics Championship. Since then they have compiled 87 consecutive wins, the longest current active streak in any NCAA Division 1 sport.
Included in Oklahoma’s eight team wins this season are victories over Illinois, Ohio State and California, three of the five teams they will compete against in in the semifinal sessions on Friday.
The Sooners are a heavy favorite to advance to the team finals on Saturday. The top three teams from each semifinal session will move on to the six-team championship, along with the top three individuals in each event not already on a team in the finals.
OU enters the NCAA Championship with the highest national qualifying score (414.713) and rank in the top three in five of the six events and No. 1 on parallel bars, high bar and still rings. Moldauer is No. 1 in the nation on both still rings and parallel bars and ranks in the top 10 on pommel horse. He and Anderson have combined for the top three all-around scores in the nation this season.
Moldauer won a school-record five individual titles at this year’s Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Championships earlier this month. He has captured a team-leading 20 individual titles so far this season.
The Sooner men are gunning a fourth consecutive national championship and 12th in program history. Only two other schools have won gymnastics team championships four years in a row (Illinois from 1939-42 and Nebraska (1979-82). Oklahoma’s 11 national titles is second only to Penn State, which has 12 national championships in men’s gymnastics.
A Sooner team title on Saturday also would tie head coach Mark Williams with former Penn State head coach Gene Wettstone, who won nine national championships.
The Oklahoma women have been equally dominant this season are themselves looking to string together consecutive national titles. A win this weekend, over a very strong field, will give OU three consecutive national championships on the women’s side.
The NCAA Women’s Championship is in St, Louis on Friday and Saturday. Oklahoma advanced to St. Louis after winning its ninth consecutive regional title and posting the highest regional score in the country (198.000). Like their male counterparts, the OU women go into the 2018 NCAA Women’s Championships with the highest national qualifying score (396.120) of the 12 teams competing for the title.
The Sooners are one of only five teams to advance to the NCAA Championships every season since 2004 (Florida, LSU, Alabama and Utah are the others).
Led by Big 12 Gymnast of the Year Maggie Nichols, Oklahoma has faced seven of the 12 teams in the NCAA Championships field this season. losing only to No. 5 Florida, which is one of the six teams in the Sooners’ semifinal session on Friday. The other four schools on OU’s side of the bracket are No. 4 Utah, No. 8 Washington, No. 8 California and No. 13 Kentucky.
As in the men’s championship, the top three schools, and top three individual qualifiers, in each of Friday’s preliminaries will move ahead to Saturday’s Super Six finals.