The Big 12 Gymnastics championship is anybody’s game.

“Anybody has the chance to win this thing. There are four teams and they’re all excellent teams. If it happens to be Missouri, Nebraska or Oklahoma, that’s just the way it is,” coach Jay Ronayne said.

The ISU gymnastics team heads to Columbia, Mo. on Saturday as the defending Big 12 champions. The makeup of the 15th-ranked Cyclones from last season to this season, however, is as different as night and day.

Iowa State took last year’s title with a lineup of five seniors, four juniors and one freshman. This weekend, only four of last year’s championship team members will compete – all four now seniors. The rest of the lineup is comprised of three sophomores and five freshmen.

Despite her team’s change in appearance, senior Janet Anson, the defending Big 12 Gymnast of the Year, is just as confident the Cyclones will leave Missouri as the Big 12 champions as she was last season, despite every conference team being ranked in the top-20 nationally.

“We are the ones coming back defending the title and with all four Big 12 schools being very dominant in the whole NCAA, it’s going to be who hits and who’s confident and I think we’re just as confident as we were last year,” Anson said. “Our freshman have stepped up amazing this week, we’re coming off our best performance of the season last weekend and there’s a good possibility [of winning].”

Freshman vault standout Megan Barnes returns this weekend after missing last Friday’s victory over Denver and Iowa because of a back injury.

Normally an all-around competitor, her back is healed just enough to allow her to compete on vault this weekend.

She says that she and her freshman teammates don’t feel any pressure to live up to expectations set by last year’s championship team because it’s a whole new team this season.

“Not pressure, but we’re just excited to go out there and show the Big 12 what we’re made of and what we can do,” Barnes said. “We are brand new so it’s just exciting to show everybody how good we are this year.”

Ronayne goes so far as to say because of the distinct differences between each year’s teams, the Cyclones aren’t defending the title so much as chasing it once again.

“It is a brand new team this year,” Ronayne said. “Every year it’s a different team, but this one in particular, because of the new coaching staff, because seven freshman are huge contributors, it’s not like we’re defending anything.

“To defend something is far more difficult than to chase something and we’re chasing after the trophy. We’re going to do everything we can do to get that and I think we’re doing that right now.”

Despite the fact that he could be the only first-year head coach to win a Big 12 Gymnastics championship in ISU history, Ronayne hopes his team is focused on their performance, not the outcome.

“I think we have a very good chance [of winning], but I don’t want to put a focus on winning or losing,” he said. “I want to put a focus on doing the same things we’ve been doing for two weeks, which is doing routines to the best of our ability.”