Headed into his first trip to Minnesota as Iowa State’s new head gymnastics coach, former Auburn assistant Jay Ronayne already knows what to expect.

“I’ve seen them for years and years,” he said. “I used to coach at West Virginia and we met them a bunch of times and they’ve always been very good. They’re a solid team from the beginning of the year to the end.”

The 13th-ranked Cyclones travel to Minneapolis this weekend to battle No. 21 Minnesota, last season’s Big 10 champions, in a meet that has Iowa State ties on both ends of the floor. Husband-and-wife duo Jim and Meg Stephenson, the co-head coaches of the Golden Gophers, graduated from Iowa State.

In fact, Jim is one of few Cyclones not from a former ISU wrestling team to win a national championship. In 1971 and 1973, he claimed two NCAA titles as a member of the now-defunct ISU men’s gymnastics team.

Members of the current ISU women’s gymnastics teams also know what it is like to compete for a national championship. In 2006, the Cyclones reached the Super Six finals of the NCAA National Championships for the first time in school history and won the Big 12 championship. The Super Six is the equivalent to the Final Four in college basketball.

The current crop of Cyclone gymnasts, however, have a much different look than last season’s team.

Seniors Janet Anson, Jade Kvach, Katie Lasher and Ashley Alden return to lead a team with little college experience, including seven freshman and a group of sophomores and juniors who didn’t compete because of being medically redshirted last season.

Despite the change in appearances, Anson believes the strong senior leadership can make this team one of the best in school history.

“We’ve helped them along the way so far and they’ve done a great job,” she said. “They’re a motivated, strong group of girls. We feel they’re just as good as us and that we’ll have a great team this year.”

So far, the Cyclones have leapt to a tremendous start. Over Winter Break, they defeated No. 18 Missouri, No. 20 Auburn and Brigham Young University at the Cancun Classic in Cancun, Mexico.

Iowa State dominated the competition, winning each event as a team and taking home three individual event titles. Freshman Megan Barnes winning the vault in her first collegiate competition.

“It was my first trip to Cancun,” Barnes said. “It was definitely the best meet I’ve ever had and a great way to start out college gymnastics.”

Ronayne pointed out that Iowa State performed even better than he hoped they would.

“They were a lot better than I expected,” he said. “Because we have some rookies on the team – we have a bunch of freshmen and two sophomores that didn’t see any action last year because they redshirted – they’re not tested under fire, so we just didn’t know what they were going to do.”

Ronayne intends on taking what led to a win in Cancun into Minneapolis this Saturday – same routines, same rotations. Kvach, however, said the team has plenty of room for improvement.

“We definitely have a lot of little things we need to fix up,” she said. “We can always improve on what we’ve done before, so we’re going to really focus on the small things – the landings, the straight legs, the little things that can really add up at a college meet.”

The competition begins at 6 p.m. Saturday at the Sports Pavilion in Minneapolis, Minn.