UCLA gymnastics starts the year ranked in thetop five of the preseason coaches poll and, for the third straight year, first in the preseason Pac-12 poll.
These rankings come at the heels of the team’s higher-than-expected fourth-place finish at last year’s NCAA championships and its recent string of NCAA titles under coach Valorie Kondos Field.
Yet for over a third of the roster, those rankings and titles mean almost nothing but more pressure.
This year, the team will field six new freshmen and has just over half of its 15 active athletes in their first or second year at UCLA.
According to redshirt junior Samantha Peszek, the team is young and completely different from what it’s been in past years.
“When you have a class leave and a new one coming in, the team chemistry is just completely different,” Peszek said. “This team is more focused and more enthusiastic about working hard with each other – in years past, everyone worked, but it was more just get in and get your job done. But we love hanging out with each other and pushing each other. The way that we work as a team together is the best since I’ve been here.”
Sophomore Danusia Francis mirrored her teammate’s sentiment, crediting the team’s closeness because of its youth as the reason for its drive. She said the team spends more time together outside of the gym than it did last year, and that makes the members of the team support each other much more than is typical in the individualistic sport of gymnastics.
“Everyone wants everyone else to do so well,” Francis said.
Yet in the eyes of Kondos Field, that camaraderie is the root of some of the team’s current growing pains.
“We don’t have any attitude issues, any lazy issues at all. We have the exact opposite of it – too much caring for the team and not wanting to let the team down,” Kondos Field said. “They play tight; they play not to lose instead of playing to win. If you play tight, you’re going to hold back a little bit and if you hold back a little bit, … you’re going to be off the beam.”
And while Kondos Field said each athlete’s desire not to ruin the competition for the others may be a bit too strong, that selflessness has manifested into more time devoted to gymnastics outside the gym.
Kondos Field said that unlike last year, she has heard of athletes not going out on a Sunday night because of early practice the next morning, has noticed athletes spending more time getting treatment to avoid injuries and has even seen athletes change their diets.
“They’re doing all those little things that we didn’t quite do last year,” Kondos Field said. “Last year we worked hard, we did a lot, but we were not a very fit team – physically fit to do the sport of gymnastics as a team – and they took care of that over the summer and it’s continued.”
And while its fitness has improved, Kondos Field said it’s the team’s confidence that now needs strengthening, especially in freshmen like Hallie Mossett.
“Hallie is really one of the best gymnasts in the country, but she’s gone through a lot of injuries so I just don’t know if she knows that she’s back,” Kondos Field said. “You’ve got to have that swagger, you’ve got to have that confidence.”
Once the freshmen get their confidence up, along with the team’s closeness and the athletes’ time put in outside the gym, Kondos Field said she thinks UCLA will be peaking at just the right time for a title.
“The job that we have to do is really getting the freshmen to believe that they are that good because I think everybody else believes it – they went through that last year,” Kondos Field said. “We’re going to be a really good team come the end of February or March.”