Oklahoma gymnastics: Sooners headed to NCAA Championships
By Chip Rouse
It’s not really news anymore when an Oklahoma gymnastics squad makes it to the NCAA National Championship.
The Sooner women and men have made it to the NCAA Gymnastics Championships on am almost regular basis for the past two decades. The OU men have won nine national championships since 2000 and the women four, including the last one, held in 2019.
Over the weekend, the OU women qualified for the NCAA Championship for the 17th consecutive time, winning the Tuscaloosa Regional over seventh-ranked and host Alabama, No. 10 Arkansas, and Missouri. It was the Sooners’ 11th straight regional championship.
The Sooners captured three of the four team titles (vault, horizonal beam and floor exercise) and finished second to Alabama on the uneven bars. In addition three OU gymnasts won individual championships, including junior Olivia Trautman, who recorded a perfect “10” score on vault. She is the first Sooner to earn a perfect score on vault in regional competition.
Other Oklahoma individual champions were senior Anastasia Webb with a near-perfect score of 9.975 on the beam, and Webb and Trautman tied for first place in floor exercise.
OU’s Webb was awarded and All-Around title.
Next stop for the Sooner women is the 2021 NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships on April 16 and 17 in Ft. Worth, Texas.
The top two teams from each of four regional sites qualify for the two-day national championship competition. Oklahoma will be paired up with Alabama and LSU and Utah, the top two teams out of the Salt Lake City regional in Semifinal II.
The Oklahoma men gymnasts also were winners over the weekend. The Sooners captured their ninth consecutive Mountain Pacific Sports Federation conference championship over No. 3 Stanford, No, 11 California and No. 14 Air Force.
OU won two of the five team events (floor exercise and vault) and earned two individual championships: Morgan Seyler in floor exercise and Gage Dyer on vault.
The Sooner men are also headed to the NCAA Championships. The NCAA Men’s Championships will be April 15 and 16 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Oklahoma won four straight men’s championships from 2015 to 2018.