Florida’s Riley McCusker on beam during the first semifinal of the 2023 NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships. (© Matthew Smith)
FORT WORTH, Texas – It’s time – the 2023 Four on the Floor is upon us. Will a new champion be crowned, or will Oklahoma go back-to-back? Individual titles have been decided, so the focus is entirely on team performance. After the semifinals, four teams remain: Florida, LSU, Oklahoma, and Utah.
Read on for a preview of the matchup and quotes from each team’s semifinal presser. You can also read our detailed recap and live blog from those meets.
The afternoon semifinal session was quite messy. Both Denver and California ended up counting falls, which knocked them out of contention. Florida was the shakiest it has looked all season, but Gator fans had something to celebrate with the return of fifth-year star Trinity Thomas. LSU ended up winning the semifinal and counted no major mistakes.
The evening semifinal was much more competitive. Utah was sharp and ended up winning the session, making the Utes only the second team to beat Oklahoma this year. Oklahoma could have been cleaner on vault and bars. UCLA was in the mix until the very end, but uncontrolled landings on vault meant the Bruins missed out on nationals by two-and-a-half tenths. Kentucky fell out of contention early after a messy bars rotation.
Florida
Florida is lucky to be here. If either Denver or Cal didn’t count falls, Florida wouldn’t have advanced. The question now is whether or not Thomas is going to go on more events for the Gators in the final. Regardless of her availability, Florida is going to need to do a 180 from its semifinal performance. This group has proven it can do just that after sub-par outings.
When reflecting on how they were able to make it through to the final day of competition, Florida Head Coach Jenny Rowland said, “We have each other’s backs. Not every day is going to be perfect, and there’s going to be ups and there’s going to be downs and it’s how you react and respond.”
LSU
LSU wasn’t really on the radar to make it to the Four on the Floor with the amount of injuries the team has endured this season. KJ Johnson returned to the floor lineup during the semifinals, but she re-aggravated her foot injury mid-routine. Look to see how the Tigers respond with their backs against the wall once again. It’s fair to say that LSU statistically has the lowest chance of claiming the title, but it’s a story of perseverance against all odds that fans would certainly laud. As we have seen throughout the postseason, anything can happen on any given day.
Jay Clark’s post-semis message to the team conveys the Tigers’ mentality ahead of Saturday: “Stay true to who you are. Let’s compete free. Let’s not scoreboard watch. Let’s just go and do our 24 routines and look up there and see what happens.”
Oklahoma
The Sooners put together a good performance in the semifinals, but they did not stick their landings as well as they can. If they are able to find their landings in the final, it’s likely their title to lose. After finishing second in the evening semifinal, head coach KJ Kindler acknowledged that the team has room to improve. She also believes the team is in a great place going into the final:
“We’ve been seeing a lot of times [where] we’ve blown it out of the park on the first night, and it’s hard to recapture that when you do that. So I do feel like we have so much more that we can gain coming back in here Saturday.”
Utah
If anyone has a chance at preventing an Oklahoma repeat, it’s Utah. The Red Rocks have shown that they are more than capable of hanging with the Sooners.
One area to watch for Utah is vault. The team does not have a full lineup of 10.0 start value vaults like the Sooners do, so the Utes have to be even more honed in on their landings than their rivals. The addition of junior Lucy Stanhope into that lineup would allow them to have all but one 10.0 vault, but that is a risk-reward decision that will need careful consideration.
Head coach Tom Farden credits the team’s mindset for getting them this far: “The biggest thing that pushes [us] over the edge is that they’re trusting each other, their confidence, and their ability to do amazing gymnastics for each other.”
