The Cyclones proved they were capable of scoring high at Nebraska two weeks ago when they tied their season high score of 196.225.

They were not able to bring that confidence to the Big 12 Championship on Saturday when Iowa State returned to the Daveny Center in Lincoln, Neb., finishing last.

“[Saturday] we let an opportunity to perform and score well slip away,” said coach Jay Ronayne in a news release. “We have to take this as a learning experience because we have two weeks until regionals, and it will be a very similar environment. We need to be as sharp at regionals as we were the previous two weeks.”

The three other teams the gymnasts faced were all ranked higher in the nation than the No. 16 Cyclones. Second-ranked Oklahoma won the conference title with a 197.175 while No. 12 Nebraska (196.625) and No. 14 Missouri (195.900) took second and third.

Iowa State placed fourth with a score of 194.850 that was the team’s fourth lowest of the season, and more than a full point below third-place Missouri.

The day before the meet, the Cyclones practiced on the Nebraska equipment in order to get acclimated to the environment. Ronayne said the team was feeling comfortable at the Nebraska arena and tried to feel like it was at a home meet.

Even though Ronayne said the practice Friday was easy, it wasn’t enough of a confidence booster for the team.

“We are comfortable with the Nebraska equipment because we do compete there every year,” said sophomore Celine Paulus. “So it’s not that we weren’t comfortable with the equipment exactly, it was more of the atmosphere because it was the Big 12s. We have a really good conference for gymnastics and we’re all ranked really high in the nation, so it was more of just the atmosphere being with all four teams in the Big 12 as opposed to just the equipment.”

Usually the Cyclones are successful at focusing on their own performances and ignoring the distractions of other teams. Paulus said the team was distracted Saturday and became intimidated by its competition.

“It wasn’t our best meet,” Paulus said. “I feel like we were a little intimidated by the competition and we were not ourselves. We kind of just let the outside things get to us instead of focusing on just us and our performances. We were a little bit apprehensive, and I feel like we could have done a lot better like what we did in the last couple weeks.”

The team is hoping to learn from its experience at the Big 12 meet in order to prepare for the NCAA Regional competition in two weeks.

“We have the time to fix the little things and go into regionals being really confident,” Paulus said. “Before the meet last week we had a really good practice, but we didn’t go into the meet with the right attitude for success. I feel like we’re going to learn a lot from that, and we’ll be completely ready for regionals and hopefully place in top two so we can make it to nationals.”