“We’re a very young team and anything can happen,” Bev Plocki, the head coach of the U of M women’s gymnastics team, said about her goals for this year. “This team wants to go to the super six and try to finish in the top three.”

With seven new freshmen, they are a very young team, but Plocki strongly believes that they can do well, especially with the seniors leading the way. “The seniors have had to do a lot more this year with leadership, and they’ve done a great job,” Plocki said.

“We’re all very motivated,” said Jordan “Jo” Sexton, a fifth year senior and co-captain along with Kylee Botterman, Trish Wilson, and Sarah Curtis.

The new additions to the team were recruited mostly with vault and floor in mind, and the freshmen have a lot to offer. A couple of the freshmen, as well as sophomore Natalie Beilstein,  are planning on opening on floor with a double layout, which is an elite level tumbling pass. Brittnee Martinez, a sophomore on the team, plans on

competing a full-in double pike, an equally difficult tumbling pass on floor.

Floor is not just about the tumbling; there is dance and choreography to go along with it. Floor is Kylee Botterman’s favorite event to compete. “You put on a show,” said Botterman, a senior and co-captain on the team, a five time NCAA All-American, and the 2010 NCAA regional all-around champion.

The line-up, the order of the girls who are competing on each event, is made up of six girls, and the top five scores count for the team’s final score. Even though each team only needs six girls to compete on each event, Plocki wants to have nine or ten girls who are capable of competing to be able to switch into the line-up in case an athlete is sick or injured. This is called depth, having more than enough competitors for each event.

“I think we could be pretty strong in every event. We probably have the least amount of depth on bars and beam,” Plocki said.

“Competing beam is about getting into a flow,” said Sexton. The four-inch-wide wooden beam doesn’t leave much room for error, and can therefore sometimes be any team’s hardest event in competition.

Every beam is different; some are squishier, bouncier, or more slippery. To get used to the beam at the Crysler Arena, the arena where the U of M meets are held, Plocki took the girls to Crysler just to do a beam inter-squad, a practice meet only within the team. Plocki set up the beam mats in the place where the beam always is at meets, and had the beam line-up compete as if they were at a meet. Mostly at practice, however, Plocki assigns challenges for the girls to do, and the girls write down what they did and how long it took them to do the challenge. Having the athletes write down the number of hit routines, solid routines that would contribute to the team score, helps Plocki pick the line-up for each event.

“I’m gonna take the more consistent person and put them in the line-up because what you do in practice is what you do in competition,” said Plocki, who is counting on a high percentage of hit routines.
In college, the team goes to a lot of meets, which is what Plocki said was the hardest transition from club to collegiate gymnastics. “Our competitions are every single weekend when we start in January, and go for the next 13 weeks,” Plocki said.

Botterman and Sexton, however, said otherwise about going from club to collegiate.

“Being a part of a team; It’s not something you have besides your state competition in club gymnastics,” Botterman said. In collegiate gymnastics, there is a different kind of pressure to hit a routine because you’re not competing for yourself, but competing for the team’s score.

“If you’re up and you fall, then the next people up have to back you up so there’s a big support system, just like believing in each other and not just yourself,” Sexton said.

Falling at a meet can be the most disappointing experience for any gymnast. But the team needs to count five scores, so the gymnasts can’t stop trying even if they fall. “You know that your score can still potentially count so you can’t just give up. You still have to have that mind set that this score is still probably going to count for the team,” Botterman said.

Sexton always knew she wanted to do collegiate gymnastics. She was the first one from her club in North Carolina to receive a scholarship and has been doing gymnastics for 19 years. Sexton looked at a lot of different schools before committing to Michigan. “I knew that this is the place that I wanted to go to,” she said. She feels that her body is done with gymnastics after so many years of intense training, but still thinks that it will be weird to be done with it. “It’s been the experience of a lifetime,” she said.

Botterman has two older sisters who were both gymnasts for the University of Illinois. “They were always my role models,” she said. Botterman grew up in Chicago, so the University of Illinois would have been the obvious choice for her. However, Botterman wanted to be different because everybody expected her to go there. Botterman said a highlight of being at U of M has been “Figuring out what it takes to become a Michigan Wolverine.”

Sexton and Botterman both enjoy the challenge, reward, discipline, and the camaraderie that comes with gymnastics. “We’re sisters,” Sexton said about her teammates.

A highlight for the team every year is BigTen championships. “That’s always a first priority for us and we’re very proud of our BigTen championships that we’ve won,” Plocki said.

Botterman said, “We expect to win,” and last year lived up to her expectations. With Penn State coming in second, the competition was a lot of fun for the athletes. Even though they made it to nationals, a couple of falls in the preliminary day caused them to miss out on the super six by just a few tenths.

“They were hugely disappointed because they knew they were a better team and belonged in the super six but we just kind of did it to ourselves by counting the falls in the prelims,” said Plocki.

The success of the team is what the gymnasts are focused on. “We don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the individual athletes until we go to nationals when they would become All-Americans or national champions,” Plocki said.

The Wolverines are focused and determined to make it to super six this year, regardless of how young the team may be.

“Look out for us this year,” Botterman said, then added to Sexton “We’re going out with a bang, Jo.”