Arizona GymCat Showcase notebook: On preseason rankings, beam depth, NQS changes, and more

The Arizona GymCats had their annual showcase last Saturday. Three days later, the WCGA released its annual preseason poll.

The Showcase always takes place in early December before the athletes take finals and head home for the holidays. This year showed where the depth is in the program.

Other interesting developments for the program and the sport were discussed with head coach John Court the day before, including changes to the NQS that were adopted fairly late.

On preseason rankings

The preseason WCGA rankings are the only major poll that is voted on. Once the season starts, there are no weekly polls. Instead, every team’s NQS is tracked on Road to Nationals. Those standings eventually determine which 36 teams advance to regionals.

The 2026 WCGA preseason poll was released on Tuesday afternoon. Arizona comes in ranked 18th. That is two spots lower than the GymCats finished last season when they were one of the last 16 teams standing in the postseason.

The reasons for the slight drop are fairly obvious. Arizona lost 10 routines with the graduations of Elena Deets, Alysen Fears, and Emily Mueller. Both Fears and Mueller were all-arounders. Deets competed on two events and was last year’s Big 12 co-Event Specialist of the Year.

The GymCat Showcase gave a glimpse into what Arizona will be working with this year as Court and his two assistants try to keep the momentum moving forward. Last season, Arizona finished second both in the regular season and at the Big 12 Gymnastics Championships. In addition to Deets’ honor, Court was the Big 12 Coach of the Year and his staff was named the WCGA Regional Assistant Coaches of the Year for the South Central Region.

On event depth

The Showcase was held in a traditional Red-Blue format with the team divided into two groups that competed against each other throughout the meet, although not every gymnast competed every event for her team. A total of 19 gymnasts competed at least once.

It was telling how many total gymnasts competed on each event. Balance beam was the only event that had two full lineups of six gymnasts on each team.

“Very thankful, because we have a lot of people that train beam, and not just train beam, but have a full beam routine start to finish,” assistant coach Shelby Martinez said. “So that’s really encouraging. It’s also really good because we lost a lot of experience last year, and beam is one of the hardest events to compete. So knowing that we can put a lot of different routines into exhibition positions, into pressure situations to see how they do, and then have a good amount of people to choose from, is really encouraging going into the season, where we will definitely have to build that beam line up and build that confidence, since we lost like three main people that were in beam their whole entire career at Arizona.”

Martinez has taken over the training responsibilities for beam this year after former associate head coach Taylor Spears left in August. Spears had built a formidable beam lineup at Arizona over her seven years with the program, but she opted to leave college sports altogether just before classes started this year. Martinez and head coach John Court are optimistic about carrying on with that.

“I’ve always loved beam,” Martinez said. “When I was an athlete, beam and vault were my two that I competed all four years and so, I mean, I’ve always loved coaching beam even before in clubs.”

The other events had far fewer competing. A total of nine gymnasts competed on vault with four going for Red and five on Blue. That’s an event that Court is training this year. Martinez took over that event last year when she returned to Arizona, but Court had been the vault coach for years prior to that.

Bars also had a total of nine gymnasts with four for Blue and five for Red. Five of the nine are new to the team and one more is a junior who has not competed in her first two years as a GymCat. The group of newbies included Sadie Smith, who transferred from Arkansas but did not compete for the Razorbacks last year as a freshman. The event is trained by associate head coach Kylie Kratchwell.

Floor exercise was even more limited. Only seven gymnasts competed on floor with four competing for Blue and three competing for Red. Two of the seven were freshmen. One of the returners has never competed floor at Arizona.

Overall, the team has depth. It’s just not experienced depth.

There are a total of 21 athletes on the roster, which is one more than allowed under the House settlement roster limit for gymnastics. Due to the late date that settlement was approved, all sports programs were allowed to grandfather athletes in for one year. It allowed Arizona to return redshirt senior Liz LaRusso and bring in Smith as a transfer without anyone being forced out of the program or any scholarships being pulled from incoming freshmen.

Youth movement

Ten athletes who performed at the GymCat Showcase have never competed in college. That includes sophomores Teagan White, Jillian Silvers, Olivia Childs, and Smith, junior Sophia Maisel, and senior Sophia Stephens. The other four new competitors were four of the GymCats’ five freshmen.

That group of 10 were not the only ones getting their feet under them at the showcase. Junior Ainsley Greever competed as a freshman but sat out with an injury last season. Greever was one of the GymCats who performed vault. Her vault had a very small hop up, but she avoided the large hops backwards that Arizona needs to eliminate to keep its vault scores competitive with a lineup of 9.95 start values.

NQS changes and the postseason

The national qualifying scores (NQS) will change this year to include more regular season meets. Court said that it didn’t have much impact on scheduling this year simply because it was adopted so late, but he will alter how he schedules going forward. Road meets become even more valuable, meaning Arizona will tip the scale towards road meets when possible beginning with the 2027 season.

Beginning with the 2026 season, NQS will include a minimum of nine meets. In the past, it included just six meets. Only five of the meets can be at home. If a team has more than five home meets, the bottom five scores are kept and the top scores are discounted. The nine or more scores being used to calculate NQS will be put in order from highest to lowest. The highest and lowest scores will be dropped, then the remaining scores will be averaged to arrive at the NQS.

“The old one was six scores, three away and the other three could be home or away,” Court said. “Dropped the high, average the remaining five. So basically you would count half your schedule. Now, it’s maximum of five home meets, minimum five away meets. So for us, we have six home meets this year. So one won’t count. So we won’t be having six home meets anymore. Nobody in the country will.”

Court said in the future, he plans to schedule five home meets and seven away meets. While that means fewer home events for fans, it maximizes the options for getting good scores that can be used for NQS purposes.

In addition, to requiring at least five away meets, what qualifies as an away meet has changed. In the past, some big programs held meets at off-campus venues. Despite the venues being within a short distance of campus, they could be used as an away score. Utah often did this at the Maverik Center.

Beginning this year, only one such regular season meet can be counted as an away meet. If the program has more than one meet in that venue, the others must be counted as a home meet. However, there is one exception that will allow Utah to continue counting two of these events. Conference championships don’t count. So, Utah can continue using the Big 12 Gymnastics Championships as an away meet despite it being held in the Maverik Center every year. They can also have one regular season meet in the venue and count it as an away score.

While some of this had been known and discussed months ago, the new rules weren’t put in place until roughly six weeks before the start of the season. That’s long after programs have put their schedules together.

“The rule just passed two weeks ago,” Court said. “The NCAA has kept it on a shelf while they got some things together. So honestly, I didn’t think it was going to pass until next year, just being so late—and I’m on the board.”