The Oklahoma Sooners have won two consecutive SEC regular-season titles and are the defending national champions in women's gymnastics, but for the second straight year, they fell just short in the SEC Championships.
The 2026 conference championship had the makings of an NCAA Final Four with the top four teams in the nation, led by the top-ranked and defending national champions Sooners, all competing in the same session on Saturday night in Tulsa. Florida, LSU and Alabama were the other teams participating in the Saturday night session. Oklahoma had beaten all three previously this season.
The competition went down to the final rotation and basically the final performers, and when the score for the last Oklahoma individual gymnast was posted, the top-ranked Sooners were on the short end of a 198.175 to 198.150 final team score, with No. 3 Florida edging Oklahoma by a slim 25 thousandths of a point (.025).
The Sooners had defeated then-No. 3 Florida 198.075-197.575 in Gainesville earlier in the season.
Oklahoma's best event this season turned out to be the team's kryptonite in the SEC Championships
Florida jumped out in the lead after the first rotation. Oklahoma's best event all season has been the vault. The Sooners rank No. 1 in the nation on vault with a National Qualifying Score (NQS) of 49.563. At the SEC Championships on Saturday night, however, OU recorded one of its lowest scores of the season on the event with a 49.325, which dropped the Sooners to fourth place after the opening rotation.
As the No. 1 seed coming into the conference championship, Oklahoma had the first pick of its rotation for the competition, and the Sooners naturally chose to lead off on vault, which had served the Sooners well all season and enabled them to take early leads.
"We had a little bit of a slow start on vault," Sooner head coach K.J. Kindler said in her post-meet press conference. "We didn't catch fire in our landings. We were doing great executed vaults, but our landings could have been cleaner."
Florida's 49.525 on beam put the Gators out in front early. No. 2 seed LSU was in second place, scoring 49.475 on bars, and Alabama's 49.425 on floor placed it in third after the first rotation.
After finding themselves down after the initial rotation, however, the Sooners responded like champions do, roaring back with a score of 49.600 on bars to pull within .050 of the lead, which now belonged to LSU through two events. All six competitors for OU on bars scored 9.900 or better with freshman Ella Murphy and senior Faith Torrez both posting scores of 9.950
Oklahoma took over the lead for the first time after the third rotation posting a 49.625 on beam, the Sooners' highest event score of the night, highlighted by a perfect 10 score by Torrez. It was her first 10 score on the beam this season.
10 ALERT 🚨@OU_WGymnastics x 📺 @SECNetwork pic.twitter.com/iOMOiGz1fc
— Southeastern Conference (@SEC) March 22, 2026
With the Sooners holding on to a narrow .050 advantage over LSU heading to the final rotation, it seemed to be a battle between No.1 OU and No. 2 LSU for the conference championship, but when Florida started sticking landing after landing on the uneven bars, the focus quickly shifted to the Gators.
The Sooners did well on the floor in their final event, recording a score of 49.600, but it wasn't enough to overcome Florida's 49.800 on bars, led by a perfect 10 by the Gators' Selena Harris-Miranda. It was just enough to award Florid its 13th SEC championship in women's gymnastics.
The championship literally came down to OU's Mackenzie Estep's performance in the anchor spot for the Sooners on the floor. Estep delivered a nearly perfect performance, but her 9.950 score wasn't quite enough to pull out the victory for the reigning national champions.
Three Sooner gymnasts captured individual titles. Torrez was the individual champion on beam for the second straight year, and Estep and Keira Wells shared the title on floor.
"When (the difference) is just .025, it's just the smallest margin of error," Kindler said. "Any little thing could have been that much better. It's a great lesson for them going into postseason."
Oklahoma reached the elite 198 mark for the seventh time this season, albeit for the first time in a losing cause. Florida's 198 score was its fourth of the season and the third consecutive meet in which it reached that level.
"That's a huge score in a postseason meet," said Kindler of her team's 198.150. "We're proud of that. We're still the No. 1 seed in the country going into the postseason. We've earned that with our consistency all season."
Next up on the schedule for the defending national champions Sooners is regional competition, which will involve 36 team and take place April 1-5 at four regional sites between Arizona State, Kentucky, LSU and Oregon State.