Freshman Notes: Oklahoma, Alabama, Michigan

More! Things! Freshmen go win yes!

OKLAHOMA
This Sooner freshman class has a little more work to do than originally anticipated after Brenna decided she was starting to contract some confidence, and the only cure was elite. Dr. Martha had the prescription, alright. Now, Oklahoma is down 3 routines from Brewer, 3 from Dowell, 2 from Clark, and 1 from Sorensen, which is more than this tiny freshman class will be able to muster, meaning the team will be leaning fairly heavily on the 90%-missing Charity Jones and the "how's that knee, again?" Maile Kanewa to act as reinforcements at some point to keep the lineups well stocked.

Aside from Brenna's contributions on vault and floor, however, Oklahoma has lost value mostly on bars and beam, and this new class should be able to help out with that. It's a very "pretty" group, so expect humanity to continue the trend of random and inadvertent weird Kathy Johnson moans, because Oklahoma. You know who you are. Nicole Lehrmann is most likely to be a major contributor, a former junior elite whose JO gymnastics has been clean as a PBS show. The toe point is a major standout quality, particularly on bars (that buttah bail), and she has the leg from and dance elements to put together a deduction-minimal beam routine.



On vault, she has shown an extended, precise full and the occasional 1.5, which could be something to watch given the rise of the 1.5 this year (although on vault Oklahoma is already replete with returners, more so than on the other events). Lehrmann doesn't necessarily have the big power on floor—though she has performed a full-in with mixed results—but she's a straddle element queen with clean D tumbling that could be useful. Also, this choreographic style is already KJ heaven.



Alex Marks is joining Oklahoma at the start of the competition season. She was an elite until relatively recently when she disappeared with implied injury, which put her on the JO-to-NCAA track until roster openings put her on the NCAA-right-now-immediately track. I mostly remember her as that one I'd never heard of at Classic (there's always one) who suddenly did a back full on beam. Beam is an interesting one for Marks because it has often been her weakest score, but I really like her on it.



Give the Oklahoma beam machine some time with that routine, and I'm there for it all day. Marks has some potential pop on vault (was training a DTY way, way back), though a few of the more recent showings have been hit-or-miss with height and landing position. Since returning to JO in 2015, she has performed a twisting-only floor routine, featuring a well-executed and usable front double full, but it will be worth keeping an eye on where the power quotient is now. Or will her NCAA career will be more of the "toe-pointing my ass off" bars and beam type?

Freshman Notes: LSU, Georgia, Nebraska

On to the next set of hopeful young freshmen! We've got several volumes of Lexie Priessman injury history to get through, so let's get going.

LSU


It won't be an easy little stroll through the meadow for LSU this year. Every possible gymnast in the universe graduated after last season, so now it's just Jay Clark and one grip sitting there writing poems about loneliness. The problem is actually not so much the number of lost routines (there's still a solid core) as the value of those routines. Seven of the eight 5th-6th routines from last year are gone, which means a hefty little number of 9.9s will need to be sculpted from somewhere TBD that may or may not exist. The good news is that this year's freshman class is wildly talented.

Let's start by addressing Lexie Priessman. It's hard to believe she's just now starting college because even when she was a junior elite she already looked like she had just moved to New York to get a job in PR, while all the other girls were like, "I'm four."



We all know what a healthy Lexie Priessman would be capable of, at least if we can remember back that far or if "healthy Lexie Priessman" is still a possible theoretical state of matter. She could be an absolute ridiculous star on vault and floor, and also everywhere because Lexie Priessman. I'm pretty interested to see what she ends up putting together on bars and beam (fingers crossed) because as an elite, her form could get pretty ragged on those events, becoming more pronounced as time went on. That seemed to be primarily a function of pushing the D-score via skills that weren't actually great ideas for her, but we'll have to see if an NCAA routine is indeed a much cleaner prospect. 

Of course, the only real question heading into Priessman's NCAA career is what shape she's in. And I don't mean shape like fitness. I mean what actual geometric shape she is. Triangle? Rhombus? Pentagram? Having endured years of the emotional and physical turmoil of OCD Sunday School, we can never really be sure. The mystery deepens. Priessman has been in various states of extreme leg-disappearedness for the last, oh, 600 months, ever since MLT put that hex on her where every time she does a skill, her body breaks into a thousand pieces. Her level of MLT-breaks will be the deciding factor as to where she ends up on the huge-star/injury-retirement scale. Can she get back to full strength? At some point?

Keeping on the topic of relatively unknown quantities post-2012, remember how obsessed you were with Sarah Finnegan for 11 minutes? Well, she's back. It's really exciting. We hope. The trouble is that we haven't seen any real gymnastics from her since the late 1950s. Is she healthy? Is she doing all the events? Is she a tatted-up truck driver now? We have no way of knowing. Finnegan was excellent all-around during her shooting-star elite career, though I have to think bars and beam will be her key events (especially post-Courville and Jordan, and post-that thing where she competed gymnastics). Both those lineups need 500ccs of undiluted Finnegan, stat. (That's her doing a lovely DLO off bars in the training video above, right? I have a lot of ID problems...) In case you also need a refresher about Finnegan's heavenly beam routine, this is important viewing, mostly because there's some priceless Elfi and Tim at the beginning about her really unique wolf turn. It's an excellent lesson in what it sounds like when Tim is 100% done with your life.



Finnegan and Priessman are intended as the replacement stars for our dearly departed favorites, but because of their injuries/lack of competition in the past eon, LSU will have to lean pretty heavily on the rest of this class to be sturdy workhorses and fill in many of these lineup gaps.

The very best thing about McKenna Lou Kelley entering NCAA is that we finally get to stop going, "Wait, are you even an elite? Then why are you at Marthaville every day?" Humanity must collectively and immediately stop trying to make MARY LOU'S DAUGHTER AHHHH happen, so it's already better. 

Freshman Notes: Florida, Utah, Stanford

We've got a whole slew of new, optimistic faces ready to start their NCAA careers in a month and a half (lots of classes with 5 and 6 freshmen this year), so before they do that, let's get to know the new meat and break down what they'll bring to their teams—besides "such great enthusiasm and a beautiful competitive spirit," thank you for your no help, coaches—and where they might contribute this year.

FLORIDA


The defending champs have certainly lost significant routines from Kytra Hunter and the Wang/Spicer 9.850 Preservation Committee after last season, but this is Florida and that happens every year. This new class is probably the second-strongest freshman group in the nation (because cut to LSU going, "wanna fight?") and will be expected to maintain a similar team-scoring pace while missing very few beats, aside from the hole in the ceiling left by Kytra's floor 10s.

It's rare that one of the most anticipated freshmen in a season is a non-elite, but such was the level of Alicia Boren's annual dominance at JO nationals, winning her age group about a hundred years in a row. With most of the name-brand elites entering this season carrying Pulitzer-level injury histories, Boren looks to be among the more reliable bets for "impact freshman," or whatever sportsball people say.



Vault and floor are a definite yes for Boren. She has a very comfortable 1.5 on vault, which is all the more valuable this season, and her floor tumbling is big, big, big. She anchored her JO floor routine with a full-in, which is a total "check me out, losers" move, and I love it. At this point, we should probably start a running tally of "SHE'S THE NEW KYTRA!!11" for the season, because it's going to be all the time. We need a gymnastics-commentary swear jar for it. I hereby ban all further mentions.



Boren's beam work will also have a definite place on the team, with her strong, secure acro elements and workable leaps. The main question mark as to her possible AA contribution will be bars since it's the weaker event of her four. It's not really a problem routine (she would compete bars for the majority of teams), but the releases are a little clunky and there's some foot form. So, while she's capable of putting up a usable bars routine, it will be more challenging to make the top 6 there. At the same time, her JO bars work is much stronger than McMurtry's was, so there's that. 9.950

Let's move on to Peyton Ernst, the one you always think is a character from Make It Or Break It and then remember that she's a real person. Ernst was an elite for a number of years, coming out of Texas (Bailie Key's Broken) Dreams, and was legitimately in the conversation for an early-quad Worlds team before her case of Generalized Elite Injury Disorder set in. She has been a little witness protectiony ever since, so in some respects it will be a wait-and-see as to how much she's able to recover those elite routines. But, with her previous elite skill set and well-rounded difficulty and quality across four events (DTY, shaposhi, DLO & double arabian on floor, strong dance elements), she would certainly contribute a big routine on any event in ideal health circumstances.



Ernst's most important event will be beam (and that's the one event we saw from her in the most recent training videos above). Remember when she showed up with that 6.3 elite beam routine and everyone went, "Is that a number?!?!?" We were so young then. Beam was the weakest event for the Gators last year (relative), and they haven't really had that second sure beam 9.900 since Macko left (SHE'S THE NEW MACKO!!11...anyone? Anyone?). Ernst can be that with the right skill composition, of which she has many, many options.

NLI Week 2016-2017

Before we get ourselves fully entrenched in bracing for the inevitable disappointments that the 2016 NCAA season will bring, it's time to take a moment to gaze with dewy-eyed optimism and childlike wonder at the possibilities resting on the post-Olympic horizon. Beginning today (Wednesday) and for the next week-ish, schools will reveal which gymnasts will join their teams for the 2017 season by confirming the completely informed and totally sensible verbal commitments those gymnasts made right before preschool graduation. You know, when you're thinking about college. 

I'll be updating this list with the various schools' press releases as they announce their incoming gymnasts' NLI signings. Now to review, NLI stands for Nine Long-term Injuries and is the document gymnasts sign to acknowledge that they are under no circumstances going to be healthy enough to compete four whole years of college gymnastics. But in real life, it stands for National Letter of Intent, and it signals an end to the recruiting process by confirming a gymnast's commitment to attend the school in question. Once a gymnast signs an NLI, the choice of school is official, unlike the previously announced verbal commitments that can and do change.

The verbal commitment is kind of like when you run into a tiring acquaintance a party and they say, "We should do something sometime," and you're like, "Yeah, that would be great, we should" but barely mean it and can always back out when you think of a good excuse. But signing the NLI is like when that tiring acquaintance texts you to say, "You're coming to dinner on Friday, right?" and you actually have to do it now because specific plans have been made. Just as a random example. 

So, let's find out who has to go to dinner on Friday.

OKLAHOMA - Release
Maggie Nichols, Jade Degouveia, Brehanna Showers

Alex Marks also signs to come aboard immediately to round out "Operation No Brenna."

“This signing class is literally giving me goosebumps." We're gonna need a bigger swag-o-meter.

UTAH - Release
MyKayla Skinner (previously signed), Missy Reinstadtler, Kim Tessen

WASHINGTON - Release
Madison Copiak, Michaela Nelson, Maya Washington

FLORIDA - Release
Alyssa Baumann, Amelia Hundley, Rachel Gowey, Maegan Chant

This is the "your job is to replace Bridget Sloan, so no pressure" group, and it will be the strongest of the 2017 classes, along with UCLA's. Just get the duct tape and staple gun ready.

Event Finals, Please Pack Your 9.9s and Go

RIP, NCAA event finals. We'll always have complaining about how long you take amid a vague hangover.  

During the great yfull purge of 2015, the NCAA League of Chief In-Charge Women also revealed that they were planning to decapitate the event finals in the town square at some time to be determined, and it turns out that time is immediately.

It is now confirmed that instead of the usual three-day competition, the 2016 NCAA championship will consist of the normal semifinals on Friday, the normal Super Six on Saturday, and then nothing on Sunday, eliminating a specific day devoted to events. (This is a slight improvement on the previously proposed Friday-rest-Sunday schedule, as advocated by the boring police from Lametown.) In another development, both the Friday and Saturday competitions will be televised live on ESPNU, a coup that the sport has been fighting for dating back to the days when TVs were a thing that people watched.

Getting live television is still a big deal in exposure for the sport (we've seen the very encouraging recent ratings from the Pac-12 and SEC Nets that helped propel this move and have brought more people into following the sport), especially for family viewing and people who still watch programs—but pronounced progrums—on the TV box, though it's increasingly less important for later-teenage, early-twenties whippersnappers who Liketweet on their iDroids and aren't particularly likely to watch the competition live on TV, and who make up a valuable demo for gymnastics that isn't catered to quite enough, but that's an issue for another day.

Well actually, it's an issue for today because there is a real chunk of people, mostly younger and therefore still valuable as human beings, who will be excluded from watching the championship since ESPNU broadcasts fall behind a subscription wall. People who don't have ESPNU or a WatchESPN login from their cable/sat package likely won't be able to watch (unless a special allowance is made), which is a long-term issue for a sport that needs every set of eyeballs it can get on its main event to stay afloat and specifically needs to cater to people in that borderline age of "I'm not doing gymnastics anymore and I might start drifting away from it toward other interests if my attention span isn't constantly reminded of it" to turn them into lifelong fans. Getting a live TV deal is still good news, but it's not exclusively good news in the present incarnation. 

Worlds 2015 – You Guys, I Think We Fixed It

Sadly, the world championship has come and gone for another year, like a fleeting spurt from a stage-mounted flamethrower that you're convinced is going to singe Max Whitlock in the everywhere. But it was a good one! From the delectably OTT pomp and circumstance of the event production, to the avalanche of live coverage being injected into our eye sockets all throughout each day (thanks USAG!), to Maurice Lardo, to that thing where that small fishing village won the bars final for some reason, this ranks as the most entertaining world championship in memory. Everyone's memory. I tapped into all of them, so I know. And, frankly, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

A little wistful? A little wistful. So, now that we'll never again get to ro-TAINT, ro-TAINT—which is what it sounded like, a bunch of children just yelling TAINT—or wait with bated breath to find out whether Glasgow is ready or not (I didn't say I'd miss all of it), that means we have just two short months left to prepare with catlike compulsive licking for the upcoming NCAA season and for remembering that a 10 is, like, good and wobbles are, like, a problem. Freshman previews are around the corner, probably.

But there's still one more day of competition to break down until it weeps for mercy, so let's get into it.

-The big bad news is that Oleg Stepko did not acquiesce to wearing his I-just-had-sex-with-a-volcano lava-smear singlet from the European Games, but thankfully, he did remind us that just because you cut your hair with half a stolen blender, doesn't mean you can't be a star. Check your judgment at the door, you worthless moron. 

-Oleg S's hair and dystopian tattooscape carried him through to a bronze on pbars and a spot in the Olympics among an exceptionally high-quality pbars field that did this weird thing where all the routines were good and impressive, and the result came down to small things like hesitations in handstands and steps on landing. Almost like an event final, or something. Leyva had just a couple breaks in form, which was enough to shove him all the way down to sixth, and Nile Wilson had the gall to be just fine and got basically a 2.

-Speaking of exactly the opposite of that, beam. Let's face it, that beam final was a steaming landfill covered in mayonnaise on a hot summer day. The people who fell were everybody. I fell during that beam final, and I was in bed. (I'm very talented.) Medals were awarded to the people who successfully completed routines, because of ACCOMPLISHMENT, minus Victoria Komova, who stayed on the beam but went Full Weeble on every acro skill, which was doubly disappointing because it both took her out of the medals and struck a devastating blow to the "Vika has no fight!" narrative because she kind of stayed on. BUT NOW WHAT WILL WE SAY WHEN SHE FALLS???? Oh right. Still that, because we'll forget about this in 11 seconds and go right back to what we thought before. Yay, ignoring evidence. 

-Pauline Schaefer and Sanne Wevers both had a number of wobbles and breaks, which means congratulations, you're the best. Schaefer hung on for bronze, while Wevers spinderella-ed her way to silver. Meanwhile, the one competitor who hit a real routine without looking as though a ghost was passing through her center of gravity at every moment, one Dr. Biles, hopped to gold by a casual full point. The beam final was basically just The Simone and Nope Show.