Andy Musselman
The gymnastics team has amassed 20 or more wins in six of the last eight seasons, but is now sitting at 13-11 with just one meet left before the EAGL conference championships.
A row of formidable opponents has kept the win total down this year, and it comes with coach Mark Stevenson currently eight wins shy of No. 400 in his lengthy coaching career.
N.C. State has taken on three teams in the top five, No. 7 Nebraska twice and seven teams in the top 15 and has lost to all of them.
With a milestone clearly in sight at season’s start, Stevenson prepared for what he called the toughest schedule in school history. But he dismisses any notion that another 20-win season and No. 400 aren’t within reach because of it.
“Who says we aren’t going to have 20 wins?,” Stevenson said. “We got this weekend and we can be 14-11, and as long as we take first or second at EAGL, we’ll have 20 wins.”
Should the Wolfpack win out and go on to achieve its first conference title since 2000, it will indeed have 21 wins on the year and the 400th for Stevenson.
If it were to happen, it would be what Stevenson wanted with the schedule he made with hopes of better preparing for conference tournaments and regional competition.
“The last three or four years we’ve been a really good team; we’ve been second at EAGL twice – once by 25-thousandths of a point, once by less than three-tenths — we’ve been at regionals going into our last event ahead of Florida and just behind Georgia,” Stevenson said. “But we’ve always managed not to finish the way I’d like us to finish.”
With the improved competition, he has tried to give the gymnasts a taste of what to expect when the postseason rolls around, where they will once again face off against talented teams in front of large crowds.
“What we did this year was go to big arenas with lots and lots of people in them,” Stevenson said. “There’s nobody’s gymnastics that we haven’t seen already.”
Stevenson said improved play in regionals was the main point of emphasis in scheduling a tough lineup.
Junior Kelsey Lee said the team’s focus is better against a tough opponent, as everyone knows there is little margin for error.
“Usually when we go against a better team, we perform better because we want to beat them and we have that drive,” Lee said. “When we go against easier teams such as Rutgers, we seem to not perform as well because [we] let our guards down as opposed to the big dogs.”
Her coach echoed the sentiment.
“I definitely agree that we perform better to a higher level against better teams,” Stevenson said.
The top 18 teams in the nation advance to national competition. Right now the Pack is No. 23, less than a point outside the position needed, with the two most recent scores being the season’s highest.
“We were pretty much on track for [No. 18], and then we had a couple of [injuries] and we had some little things that slowed us down so we didn’t get to our highest scores earlier,” Stevenson said.
“We’re trying to set them up to be able to walk into regionals and not think anything about it being regionals, just think about doing your routine and getting it done. And then we’ve got a shot.”