Gymnastics Selected to Iowa State Region for NCAA's
3/23/2015 12:00:00 AM | Women's Gymnastics
EAST LANSING, Mich. - Michigan State will travel to Ames, Iowa to compete at the 2015 Regional Championships as announced by the NCAA on Monday. MSU is among the 36 schools selected to compete at regionals and enters the postseason as the No. 5 seed in the Iowa State Region along with LSU, Nebraska, Denver, Washington and Iowa State. This marks the Spartans' 16th overall appearance in an NCAA Regional.
"I'm really excited that the team has qualified for the NCAA Regional Championship," said head coach Kathie Klages. "I'm thrilled that we are going and I really expect our team to fix the things that we thought went wrong at Big Ten Championships."
The Spartans, who rank 28th in the country with a 195.710 regional qualifying score, will be competing as a team at the Regional Championships for the first time since the 2012 season. Michigan State is coming off of an eighth-place finish at the 2015 Big Ten Championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan where they tallied a 195.650 as a team.
Junior Lisa Burt leads the Spartans in all-around competition this season, ranking 23rd in the nation with a 39.345 RQS. Sophomore Elena Lagoski, who holds eight floor crowns on the season, is tied for 11th in the nation with a 9.920 RQS on the event. After recovering from injury in the beginning of the 2015 season, senior Alina Cartwright has made her way back into the lineup, most recently posting a career high 9.950 on vault against Arizona, BGSU and EMU (March 6).
"We just really want our athletes to go into this competition with the confidence that they have gained from the entire season and just rock the competition," said Klages.
Three individual gymnasts represented Michigan State at the 2014 NCAA Regional Championships last March, competing at the Maravich Center on the campus of LSU. Cartwright and Burt placed fifth and seventh in the all-around, while Lagoski finished ninth on floor exercise.
The top 18 teams are seeded on a national basis, based on RQS. Teams 19-36 are organized into three pods (19-24, 25-30 and 31-36) and placed geographically at each of the six sites, beginning with teams 19-24 followed by teams 25-30 and then finally teams 31-36. All-around competitors and event specialists are assigned to their respective geographic region or the designated site for their region.
