When the Terrapins gymnastics team moved from the East Atlantic Gymnastics League to the Big Ten two years ago, it knew its conference schedule would get tougher.
But the Terps are still scheduling tough nonconference meets. They’ll face off with No. 11 Arkansas on Friday nigh — the sixth time this season the Terps will go up against a team above them in the rankings.
Coach Brett Nelligan said facing challengers like Arkansas out of the SEC — arguably the nation’s best conference — offers many benefits. The Terps will look to take advantage of these tests and make the most of hosting a championship-caliber squad.
“It’s an opportunity for us to prove to the nation and to ourselves that we’re good enough team to hang with the top [teams],” Nelligan said. “We just need to put it all together.”
An upset over the Razorbacks would be a significant win for the Terps, but the veteran coach is more concerned with his team’s routines rather than the final result.
“I would rather get a 196 and lose than get a 193 and win,” Nelligan said.
The coach’s attitude aligns with the NCAA selection process, which evaluates programs based on their scores rather than their win-loss records.
And Nelligan, who has led the Terps to the postseason seven straight years, said the top squads can benefit his team’s routines.
“If the judges see a top-ranked team come in here and see this is what a 9.9 routine looks like,” Nelligan said, “I’m hoping they look at us and say, ‘You know what? That routine is just as good.”
But if the Terps have a repeat of their last meet, their scores likely won’t be good enough to pull out a victory, regardless of how the judges score their routines.
In a 194.85-194.425 loss against Rutgers on Sunday, the Terps fell twice on balance beam and nearly had a third gymnast go down, too. Their struggles on the third rotation overshadowed a strong performance on the other three events. This time around, Nelligan doesn’t expect the same showing on beam.
“We’re a good beam team, we have very talented beam workers,” Nelligan said. “Everyone has a bad day.”
The beam has been the Terps’ lowest-scoring event this season — they average a score of 48.395 — but they showed their potential by scoring a 48.8 earlier in the season.
And while the team has been putting an emphasis on putting together complete performances, no meet showed these inconsistencies better than Sunday’s, when the Terps’ posted a season low of 47.975 on beam and a season high of 49.000 on vault.
“It’s encouraging and frustrating,” junior Sarah Faller said. “I know that we have that potential because I’ve seen it before. It’s just about piecing it together.”
They’ll look to do so against Arkansas, in a meet in which Faller said the Terps have “nothing to lose.”
Instead, it’s an opportunity for them to see where they stack up against one of the country’s best programs.
“There’s the saying, ‘I either win or I learn,'” senior Kathy Tang said. “I don’t like saying that we lost, because it just shows us what we need to work on.”
