Last year’s NCAA championship didn’t start so well for UCLA gymnastics. The Bruins only hit two clean floor routines in their first rotation, scoring just a 48.95 to leave themselves with a tough uphill climb.
They’ll have a chance to redeem themselves Friday at this year’s rendition of the NCAA Team Semifinal. No. 8 UCLA (13-5) is set to compete in the second of two semifinal sessions against five other top programs: No. 1 Oklahoma, No. 3 Alabama, No. 5 Utah, No. 9 Nebraska and No. 11 California.
Three of the six teams will advance to Saturday’s NCAA Super Six, where they will compete with the top-three teams from the other Friday semifinal held earlier in the day.
The top-ranked Sooners, who defeated the Bruins 197.95-197.20 in March, should be the heavy favorite to win the later semifinal session, considering they are the best of the six teams in each of the four events. They are tied for third on vault and lead the country in the other three events.
The Crimson Tide, although they lost 196.55-196.30 to the Bruins in the team’s season-opening matchup, are a daunting foe as well. Alabama holds top-five rankings in three events: the bars, the beam and the vault. On floor, they are tied for sixth.
The Cornhuskers and Golden Bears seem the least likely to pose a threat for a berth in the Super Six. Among the six teams in the semifinal session, those two programs are the bottom two in three of the four events.
UCLA and Utah will likely therefore contend for the third and final berth in the Super Six along with Oklahoma and Alabama. The Bruins defeated the Utes in early February in Pauley Pavilion, took first place at Pac-12s over the Utes, then finished second to them in the regional.
Utah outranks UCLA in three of the four events while the Bruins rank higher on beam.
The Bruins will start the meet with their weakest event, the uneven bars, in which they rank 12th in the nation this season by regional qualifying score. They will then move to the beam, then the floor and then finish up with vault.