Utah gymnastics: Utes have answered all the questions entering NCAAs

Many members of Utah's gymnastics team entered the 2016 campaign young and naive about the competitive season ahead, but they did know enough to understand what was expected of them, or actually, what wasn't.

With long-time coach Greg Marsden retiring, they knew all eyes were on them to see if the program would decline in his absence.

"We didn't want it to get worse just because Greg left," freshman Sabrina Schwab said this week . "We felt like we had a lot to prove, not only because Greg left, but because we lost a lot of great seniors. We wanted to show we could fill their spots."

Consider those goals reached. Now all the fifth-ranked Utes need to do to put an exclamation mark on the season is have a strong showing at the NCAA Championships which start Friday in Fort Worth, Texas.

To a certain extent, the Utes enter the NCAAs with some pressure off them. They've shown they can compete with the best in the nation, but they enter the championships knowing Oklahoma and three-time defending champion Florida are the heavy favorites.

While they would love to come out of the NCAAs with a trophy, the Utes feel they have already 'won' the season in a way by finishing the regular season with just one narrow loss to UCLA, placing second to the Bruins at the Pac-12 meet then winning the NCAA regional crown.

They were able to do all that despite having eight freshmen and sophomores combined, plus several key injuries — including the season-ending Achilles injury to Kari Lee.

"They have exceeded expectations," Utah coach Megan Marsden said. "People said this was going to be a rebuilding year and they didn't like that terminology. They took it into their own hands to prove they are better than that, that they were a Utah team that could contend. It has been gratifying for Tom [Farden, co-coach] and I to watch and see how competitive this group is."

If this was indeed a rebuilding year, the future looks bright for the Utes, no matter what happens this weekend. The Utes will lose key seniors in Kailah Delaney, Breanna Hughes and Kassandra Lopez, but they also believe they've set a good foundation for the future in this new, post-Greg Marsden era.

"We proved a lot of people wrong," sophomore Samantha Partyka said of the so-called rebuilding year. "Coming into this year, we couldn't compare ourselves to other teams in the past, we knew we just had to do the best we could do. Being a young team makes us different from teams in the past but not less competitive."

Perhaps most encouraging to the coaching staff was how the team responded to injuries. Losing Lee was a huge blow, and having Delaney and Partyka out at times forced gymnasts into lineups before it was ideal.

Yet the Utes responded well, save for the Pac-12s, where the absence of Maddy Stover on the balance beam might have cost Utah the win.

Nevertheless, they bounced back at regionals and now enter nationals with their confidence high.

"It is hard to live up to the expectations of the last 40 years, but I'm proud of what we did this year," senior Kassandra Lopez said. "We handled it all well."

Now they just need to put a finishing touch on the year.