College Online Cources

PUBLISHED: March 19, 2011

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Head coach Joanne Bowers and the UW gymnastics team will compete in today’s Pac-10 Championships.

To the upstart goes the opportunity.

The No. 17 Washington gymnastics team is the feel-good story of the Pac-10 conference, a program that has arisen from the dead in the past five years. Yet the Huskies think they may just be ready to make another quantum leap, to grow from being the league’s little sister to one of it’s powers.

“Everybody is talking about Washington as being the up-and-coming team that has improved so much,” head coach Joanne Bowers said. “But when they are talking about the top teams in the Pac-10, they are still talking about Stanford, Oregon State, and UCLA. Until we can get into that conversation, that is what we are working for.”

Saturday’s Pac-10 Championships in Los Angeles, the team’s fifth under Bowers, will be the Huskies best chance yet to crack this fabled three-headed monster of the conference, the Cerberus of the west coast. It will be a tall order and no one within the UW program denies that. But if any squad may be up to the task, it is this year’s version, led by its own three-pronged attack: senior captains Haley Bogart, Kristen Linton, and Sam Walior.

This year is the trio’s fourth Pac-10 Championship. Their best finish so far came in their sophomore years, when the Huskies came in fourth. But Linton thinks that this year’s team may just be the best yet, a thought that scores support.

“Out of all the years I have been here, I think this team is the most confident,” she said. “So I am excited to see what we can do.”

Counterintuitive as it is, Saturday’s meet is technically part of the regular season. Therefore, team scores will be counted toward their respective RQS totals, which determine seeding and placement for the postseason and specifically Regionals.

The top 18 teams in the nation are seeded for Regionals, and thus have a much greater chance of advancing to the 12-team NCAA Nationals, which obviously puts the 17th-ranked Huskies in a rather precarious position. A good score, most likely anything above a 195.5, will cement the team’s spot— but a major slip-up could easily push them out of the top 18.

“I think if we just do what we have been doing all season, we should be okay,” Bowers said. “But it is always nerve-wracking, especially when we don’t have much room to play with anymore.

“It has been our goal all year as a team to be in the top 18. It is important to us, and I would be lying if I said it wasn’t.”

If the Pac-10 Championship’s results were to mirror the current conference standings, the Huskies would finish in fourth place, comfortably sandwiched between fifth-place Arizona and third-place UCLA, the defending national champions. But the team is only a great performance of its own or a miscue from one of the favorites away from breaching the top three.

“That would be amazing,” Linton said of the feeling if the Huskies were able to fight their way up the leaderboard.

Bowers also talked about how the team would react to a UW upset.

“It would probably be like we just won the Super Bowl,” she said. “It would be absolutely fantastic.”

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