Auburn's scoring potential tells a different story from what's been seen in meets this year. Here's a look at why the Tigers are still in 'full attack mode'
Going on the road to LSU and Dallas, the Tigers remain confident that they can still be a strong team despite a shaky start. The data backs that up.
It’s “Us vs. The World” for Auburn gymnastics this weekend, with nothing around each Auburn gymnast except their teammates, their coaches, the walls of the plane, bus, or hotel around them, and a singular focus on the problem at hand: Auburn has not performed as well as it did in the season opener against NC State since that date, and the Tigers haven’t performed in front of judges to the potential they’re certain they perform at practice every day.
Auburn gets another chance to fix it during a weekend road swing that starts Friday night at LSU, and continues Sunday night on the podium at the Metroplex Challenge.
With isolation on the road comes opportunity, or so Auburn head coach Jeff Graba sees it. The Tigers will be massive underdogs at LSU, but they can always take a major step forward in scoring even in head-to-head defeat — and Graba remains confident of doing great things this season based on what the staff has seen in practice.
College gymnastics 101
The podium is the raised platform, three or four or so feet tall which each apparatus sits on in elite-level meets and at the NCAA Championship. The podium may give each apparatus a bit more bounce and give than gymnasts would feel when it was placed directly on the arena floor, which is why Graba likes to get his team podium experience in the regular season before the postseason begins.
The coaches track their success rates in practice and Graba said there’s a discrepancy between that and what’s been seen out onto the competition floor.
“Oh yeah,” Graba said earlier this week, before the Tigers hit the road. “The other way to look at it, I call it there’s no ‘repeat offenders.’ Nobody’s consistently been, ‘Hey, we need to pull this person and put somebody else in.’ We’ve all taken our turn. And, in fact, all the events have had a bad performance at one point. So, to me, it’s the inconsistency.
“We’ve got a lot of young people that are in new positions, and you can see they don’t truly trust themselves at this point. We’ve just got to believe in ourselves a little bit and we’ve got to find that.”
To Graba’s point about few repeat offenders: Bars has been Auburn’s most-maligned lineup this season, and it’s been different athletes dragging the bars score down at different meets this season. Save for a true freshman, no one has scored below a 9.7 more than once this season. Five Auburn gymnasts have scored below a 9.7 at some point this season — but four of them haven’t done it again. Only freshman Charlotte Booth has logged two such scores this season, and the obvious conventional expectation is that freshmen improve with experience over the course of their first season.
Auburn had to count a fall on bars last Friday against Kentucky. “Honestly, believe it or not, bars was better,” junior Julianne Huff said, though, in the post-meet press conference, and she had a point: Auburn’s top three scores marked Auburn’s best top three scores in any meet all season.
“The people who fell, what we asked them to do, they did better,” Graba said. “Now, they messed up a skill that we didn’t think they would mess up, but this is gymnastics. It’s going to happen. You do drop a ball once in a while when you’re a wide receiver. You’re not 100-percent. But the stuff we asked them to do, they did better.
“I totally agree with what (Huff) said. So, we made the changes we needed to make, we got unlucky with a couple of people that made uncharacteristic mistakes, but yes, the top end got better. Our goal is, yeah, we’re not scoring well but we don’t want to hit and go 49.1; we need to be a 49.4 team. We need to shoot for those scores. That’s been our perspective, just try to go for the big ones.”
Auburn certainly can get into that 49.4 range. Here’s the data that proves it: