The UCLA gymnastics team has only four home meets this season. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the “Bruin Magic” the team relies on is confined to Pauley Pavilion.
“It’s just so sad that we only have four home meets,” senior Emma Malabuyo said. “But even though we’re traveling pretty far – like when we went to Maryland – the crowd was filled with UCLA fans. It’s cool to see traveling in the Big Ten that we have fans all over the nation.”
The Bruins are drawing regular crowds to correlate with their consistently high scores. Three consecutive team scores greater than 197 have UCLA ranked as the No. 6 team in the nation as it heads into a high-profile matchup against No. 5 Michigan State.
It’s the second of UCLA’s four home meets this season and it’ll be presented on a national stage as well. FOX (Ch. 11) will be broadcasting the meet, which is slated for 2:30 p.m. Saturday.
“That’s a pretty exciting thing,” UCLA head coach Janelle McDonald said. “We get to be the team that gets to show, hopefully, a whole new audience what NCAA gymnastics is about. That’s an honor we’re really proud of, that we get to do that and we want to be able to put on a show.”
UCLA (5-2 overall, 2-0 Big Ten) didn’t have its strongest showing last time out against Illinois but still upheld its 197 standard. The Bruins are seeing that number as a benchmark and a starting point with seven meets left on the schedule.
“We are just grazing the surface of what we’re capable of,” Malabuyo said. “It’s a good placement of like, OK, we’re a good enough team where we can hit consistently 197s, but we still are trying to stick all of those landings and we have like little improvements here and there, so we have so much potential.”
Malabuyo is the No. 3 balance beam competitor in the country and the Bruins have the fifth-best beam squad in the nation, but the event was a shortcoming against Illinois.
Leadoff Emily Lee, who has consistently gotten the group off to strong starts, wobbled twice and Katelyn Lee had a fall. It resulted in the second-lowest beam score of the season for UCLA even though Malabuyo and Chae Campbell excelled in their own routines.
“If we have really resilient competitors that are really intentional about what they’re doing,” McDonald said, “then we’re going to be able to reset any moment and kind of steady the lineup and get back to doing what Bruins do. And so I was really proud of them and this week in training has been awesome. The one thing they aren’t doing is we’re not focusing on the last weekend.”
Strong performances on vault have also helped catapult UCLA. They recorded their highest event score of the season last weekend with a 49.325 and have had a consistent lineup of Lee, Campbell, Jordan Chiles and freshman Macy McGowan.
Michigan State’s vault squad ranks fourth nationally, with an average event score of 49.306, and the Spartans (5-1, 2-0) have two top-10 vaulters in second-ranked Nikki Smith and eighth-ranked Sage Kellerman.
“I feel even more competitive and I feel this fire inside of me and I think the team can feel it too,” Malabuyo said of the team matchup. “It adds that extra like oomph. We want to go out there. We’re hungry. We are so ready. We’re gonna just attack our gymnastics and just be aggressive when we go out there.”
No. 5 Michigan State (5-1, 2-0) at No. 6 UCLA (5-2, 2-0)
When: 2:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Pauley Pavilion
TV: FOX (Ch. 11)