No. 8 Alabama Gymnastics 'Fired Up' to Compete at SEC Championship Meet
Alabama gymnastics had the opportunity to win the regular season heading into the final rotation last time out against Florida, but did not score enough on the floor rotation to beat the Gators.
Now, No. 8 Alabama will get the chance to rematch against the No. 2 Gators along with the six other teams at the SEC Championship meet in Huntsville Saturday night starting on that same rotation.
"This team is so fired up to be at the SEC championship and to compete on a quad setting with four events going on at the same time and being able to show off all the hard work," Alabama coach Dana Duckworth said.
There are eight SEC schools that have gymnastics programs, so the conference splits the championship meet into two sessions of four with the four highest ranked team based on National Qualifying Score in the evening session.
Alabama is seeded third behind Florida and LSU and ahead of fourth-seeded Arkansas in the evening session starting at 7. The afternoon session featuring Kentucky, Auburn, Georgia and Missouri will start at 2:30.
Because the championship is a quad meet, it is a very different format than what the gymnasts are used to during the regular season. This means that four teams are competing all it once, and there are not breaks in between routines to wait for a gymnasts from another team to finish.
It also means the Crimson Tide will start on a different event. Normally, in dual meets, the home team starts on vault and the visiting team starts on the uneven bars. Since Alabama is seeded third, this mean the Tide will start on floor.
"This is an awesome rotation, to start on floor and end on beam is very powerful for this team," Duckworth said.
The Alabama coach also told her team that they must go in with complete confidence because at meet like this, it often comes down to the final routine.
"It's a mindset of, it doesn't matter what event we start on," Duckworth said. "We attack from the very beginning to the very end and put the very best out there.”
The Tide will start on floor before moving to vault and then ending the competition on bars and balance beam.
Because of the pandemic cancelling last season's gymnastic postseason, only the juniors and senior on the Alabama roster have postseason experience including Alonza Klopfer. The senior said that the upperclassmen and coaches have been preparing the underclassmen at practice for what the postseason energy and environment is like.
"We've been preparing this whole season, and I think we're definitely already on the same page, only differences I think in postseason is just the energy is different, especially at SECs having all SEC teams there," Klopfer said.
The 2021 SEC Championship meet was originally supposed to take place in New Orleans, but was moved to the Von Braun Center, an arena in which Alabama has experience competing, back in February because of the pandemic.
"I'm so grateful that Huntsville was able to step up and be able to have this for us right here in our own state, that's literally such a great opportunity and honor to have," Klopfer said.
Luisa Blanco, who is currently ranked fifth in the country in the individual all around and second in the SEC only behind Florida's Trinity Thomas, is excited about her first chance to compete at the SEC Championships.
"Dana always talks about it," Blanco said. "We finally get to postseason, and it’s like we’ve done the hard work. We’ve done the returns. It's automatic at this point, and it's just showing off how good we are, and I’m just super excited for that for postseason."
Alabama has not won an SEC Championship meet since Duckworth's first season as head coach in 2015, and it will be no easy task in 2021 going up against some of the best teams in the country like No. 2 Florida and No. 4 LSU.
However, as Duckworth has said all season long, this team is capable of competing with any team in the country when they hit 24 for 24 routines.
"We've chosen to focus on faith and confidence, and not worry about the things we cannot control," Duckworth said. "I'm just excited for them to be able to start on an event that we're very strong on and just build from there."
