The ISU gymnastics team thinks it has found the answers to its recent floor exercise struggles.

After falls, missteps and other mistakes on floor exercise left Iowa State with its lowest floor score (48.000) in years against Oklahoma last weekend, the 10th-ranked Cyclones (7-3) worked especially hard in practice this week to work the kinks out of routines.

“We’ve been really working hard on floor this week after the mishaps that happened in the meet [against Oklahoma],” said freshman Nikki Dilbert. “We just want to really focus on that event and fix the little things.”

Dilbert is one of three Cyclone freshmen that fell on floor exercise last weekend. Unusually, each gymnast lost balance and fell on the last flip after performing very solidly in the rest of their routines.

Speaking on behalf of her freshman teammates, Dilbert said the mistakes on floor have been cleaned up heading into Sunday’s meet against No. 24 Illinois (3-4) and unranked Northern Illinois (4-3).

“Oh yeah, we’ve definitely cleaned those up,” Dilbert said.

“We are ready to go out there and hit.”

The Cyclones are currently 16th in the nation on floor exercise, with an average score of 48.650.

Hearing one of his athlete’s speak so confidently about improving previous mishaps is music to Jay Ronayne’s ears. The first-year head coach said his team has put some serious work into floor exercise routines this week and made improvements.

“The confidence level of the team is at an all-time high, which is cool, especially coming off a meet where we didn’t perform as well as we could, so it’s been a really nice week of practice,” he said.

He notes, however, that the retooling of routines is a continual process focused on Iowa State’s ultimate goal – reaching the NCAA Championships for the second year in row.

“We’ll be working on [floor] for the next four, five, six weeks,” Ronayne said. “We’re training for April – we’re not training for this weekend.”

Also of note this week is the switch to team regional qualifying score to determine national rankings. Each season, as conference and NCAA Regional championships draw near, ranking determinations move away from team score average to a complicated mathematics formula to decide the nation’s best programs.

Thankfully, Ronayne is well versed in regional qualifying score and can summarize the formula in a few simple sentences.

“I will try to make the world’s most confusing formula a little less confusing,” Ronayne said jokingly. “We take our top six scores, three of them must be away scores. We drop the high score and then average what’s left.”

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