Alabama Gymnastics Ready for NCAA West Region Championships
4/2/2004 12:00:00 AM | Gymnastics
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CORVALLIS, ORE – A solid practice session behind them, the No. 3 Alabama Gymnastics team is ready to compete here in Gill Coliseum tomorrow night for one of the two bids to the NCAA Championships available out of the NCAA West Region Championship.
After traveling cross country on Wednesday, Alabama took yesterday to see the sights of Oregon, traveling approximately an hour to the state’s rugged coastline. Today though, it was back to business as the Crimson Tide worked out for over an hour, getting its first test run on the equipment they will compete on tomorrow night at 6 p.m. PT. Things went smoothly with the gymnasts laughing and smiling between rotations.
“We’re ready,” Alabama head coach Sarah Patterson said. “We had a good day today. We don’t have to be extraordinary tomorrow night to advance. We have to be very good, but we don’t have to do anything that is outside our abilities. We just have to keep going the way we have been over the last month of the season and we will advance to the national championships.”
Alabama starts tomorrow night on the balance beam and will finish on the uneven bars. If they advance, it will be the Tide’s 22nd consecutive trip to the NCAA Championships, a streak matched only by the Utah Utes. Alabama is coming off its best meet of the season, scoring a 197.950 at the SEC Championships. While the Tide is ranked third by regional qualifying score, a mathematical formula that seeds teams into the six regionals, it is ranks first in overall average.
At the regional championships, the top 18 teams in the nation by RQS are seeded into the six regionals, the rest of the six-team field is filled out by the next three highest ranked teams from that region. Alabama will be competing against host No. 10 Oregon State and No. 15 Oklahoma, the two other seeded teams at this regional, as well as Boise State, Cal State Fullerton and California. The top-2 teams from each regional will advance to Los Angeles, Calif., the final site.
Alabama has won 19 regionals since taking the first in 1983, including the last six in a row.
