We’re officially halfway through the NCAA gymnastics season, and as hard fought matchups continue, teams are grappling with the annual battle between preparation and preservation during a long 15-week season. That challenge is particularly apparent this week for UCLA and Cal.
Gymnastics Now spoke with California Co-Head Coach Justin Howell and UCLA Head Coach Janelle McDonald about how the teams are focusing on taking care of their athletes and their bodies at this point in the season.
“The biggest thing at this time of the year is, they’ve now competed five, six times in a row, and so we’re just managing their bodies so that they’re continuing to get stronger, continuing to have ownership over what they’re doing,” Howell explained.
While his No. 7 Golden Bears are facing a huge midseason Pac-12 matchup this Saturday against No. 6 UCLA, Howell shared their training isn’t different from what they’d be doing to prepare for any other team at this point in the season.
“There’s no defense in gymnastics, so we don’t prepare for a particular team,” Howell said. “I can tell you that where we are in the season right now, we are really working on those finite details.”
Finite details like perfect handstands, stuck landings, and consistent execution is what the Cal team is focused on.
“Those are the things that we’re really dialing in on in the gym,” Howell elaborated. “We’re trying to find that balance of numbers for preparation and listening to their bodies.”
The Bruins’ McDonald, who formerly worked for Cal as an assistant coach echoed this approach.
“I would say we’ve definitely kind of shifted gears to being very detail-oriented,” McDonald said. “That’s where our focus is. Our goal, every day, is to come in and really try to lock in and clean up all the little details that will help us really maximize our scoring potential.”
Howell and McDonald both emphasized that, at this point in the season, it’s important their athletes are feeling healthy. As a result, they’re making adjustments to their training plans to make sure they’re not over doing it.
“A big part of this point of the season is just feeling really good, feeling healthy,” McDonald said. “It’s being really efficient and intentional about what we do every day in the gym so that we can make those little corrections to help our scores, but also just make sure that we’re not doing too much to feel sore or tired by the end of the weekend.”
Honing in on intentional improvements during practice is a strategy that Howell mentioned as well.
“We’re constantly putting them in different pressure scenarios in the gym, too. We’re not doing tons and tons of numbers, but what we are doing is really meaningful,” Howell explained. “So that they can feel as confident as possible as they head into Saturday.”
Howell worked backwards when planning for the postseason. He said instead of amping up their numbers in training, the team is actually dialing down their intensity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouCFrHA_EU4
“It’s not really trending down, but we’re shifting the intensity from a lot of numbers in that physical preparation to what are the little things that we need to do,” Howell said. “It’s quality over quantity at this point.”
It’s all in an effort to advance into the later rounds of the postseason.
“So that when we get to regionals, and now we have two days of competition with one in between, that we can be our best in that regional final, so that we can advance and move on to the national championships,” Howell concluded.
Saturday will be the first time McDonald returns to Haas Pavilion, her old stomping grounds, but this time as the leader of the one of the Bears’ most notorious rivals.
You can watch No. 6 UCLA face No. 7 Cal at Haas on Saturday evening at 5 p.m. ET.
