How Alabama Gymnastics Went from Bottom Seed to Evening Session at SEC Championships

With the addition of Oklahoma to the SEC last season, one team of the conference's nine gymnastics team got left out of the 2025 SEC Championship meet, and Alabama was dangerously close to being the team on the outside looking in at a championship meet that was going to be held in its own state.

The Crimson Tide is heading into this postseason in a much different position. The seeding for SEC championships is determined by a team's National Qualifying Score (NQS) with the top four teams in the evening session and the bottom five teams in the afternoon session. (No team is left out this year.) Alabama is the No. 4 seed at the 2026 SEC Championship meet, competing in the night session alongside No. 1 Oklahoma, No. 2 LSU and No. 3 Florida. It is also the No. 4 team in the nation.

"I think it goes with that saying—it just means more," Alabama head coach Ashley Johnston said. "To be the top four teams in the country competing at an SEC championship, it’s any team can win this thing. It’s an incredibly competitive conference. I think that says a lot about what we’ve been competing in all season long, but if we want to be our best at the end of the season, it’s important to train in practice competing with the best. We’ve been able to do that every week, competing against the best talent in the country."

Since opening week, Alabama has been consistently been at the top of the national rankings and one of the highest-scoring teams in the country. The Crimson Tide did not have one meet below a 197 all season. The lowest score of the season was s 197.125 at Illinois. For reference, Alabama scored below that mark nine times last season, including at last year's SEC title meet.

"This season, competing in a night session has been a goal of ours," Johnston said. "I think there’s been high standards set for this team, a lot of great accountability to help make sure we stayed on pace to do that. This team has been unwilling to make excuses and just continues to relentlessly push to accomplish their goals. They’ve been able to ignore a lot of the noise thrown their way— that’s not just this year, that’s years past as well. There’s a lot of belief on this team. There’s a lot of a grit. There’s a lot of fight. And that’s something we want Bama gymnastics to be known for."

Alabama came out of the gates hot with a 197.475 in the opening meet at Clemson. It was the highest opening score in program history and a sign of things to come with a special team. The Crimson Tide reached its regular-season peak in back-to-back meets against Arkansas and Auburn in mid-February with a 197.950 in each meet.

The team is now coming off three straight meets that are below average for the standard it set to start the year, including the season low 197.125 at Illinois on March 8. The team had to count a fall for the fist time against Kentucky on March 9 with two falls on balance beam and followed it up with major mistakes and low score on beam in the next two weeks.

"I’m not concerned about a couple of mistakes," Johnston said. " I think that’s part of the process of breaking through. We often say you have to break down to break through, and I think we’ve been able to break down some of the little issues that were stopping us from accomplishing our best performance, and so we’ve been able to break those things down to better understand them so that we can break through and be the team we know we can be.”

Alabama senior gymnast Rachel Rybicki has fully experienced the highs and lows over the last four years and said the team isn't focusing on the lower scores over the last few weeks.

"What happened in the past isn’t in our minds anymore," Rybicki said. "It’s something that happened, yes. And it’s something we’re going to learn from and take lessons from to improve going into this next part of our season. The message is to just attack and to go big. We’ve been preparing all preseason and throughout season for this moment, and this is what we’re trained for. We’re trained to compete under the highest amounts of pressure and trained to compete at our best for these moments. The team is ready for that, and they’re excited about that.”

The first session of SECs will start Saturday at 2 p.m. CT in the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma with Georgia, Arkansas, Missouri, Auburn and Kentucky. The evening session will start at 7 p.m., and the highest overall score between the two sessions will be crowned the SEC champion. Alabama is going for its first SEC title since 2021.

The Crimson Tide will open on the floor exercise, where it ranks second in the country and has the chance to build a lot of momentum, before moving to vault, uneven bars and finishing on the balance beam.

"We feel like we’ve seen it all," Johnston said. "We know and believe that we can handle whatever is thrown at us. It’s about having the confidence and believing in our ability.”

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