Although NCAA spring sports have been on the move for almost two months now, some winter sports are still wrapping up. NCAA gymnastics is at the tail end of its season and looks forward to the national championship on Saturday, April 15. 

Eight teams including the University of California,Berkeley, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Utah, UCLA, the University of Denver, the University of Kentucky, the University of Florida, and LSU, will all be participating in the semi-finals on April 13. While these eight teams have been working extremely hard this season and proved that they should continue on, the University of Michigan got screwed over in the regional finals.

At the conclusion of the first few nights of competition, the remaining four teams to compete for a semifinal appearance included the University of Denver, LSU, Michigan, and Oregon State. The top two teams with the highest team scores at the end of the final night would have the privilege of moving, on but this region had some very strong contenders that would make this no easy task. And then, something remarkable occurred; two teams with the same final score is not a common sight in gymnastics, but a tie made its appearance that night. LSU and Michigan both ended up tying for the second-place spot, right behind Denver. 

While your goal in gymnastics is to be perfect, that is not always the case, and sometimes mistakes can happen. Since falls and injuries can happen mid-routine, the rulebook allows each team to put six girls in its line-up. With this in mind, the team scores are created by the top five scores of each event, leaving a little bit of room for those mistakes. After the top five scores from both teams were added up for each event, they were left with a tie and an incredible score of 197.750. 

Instead of doing the simple thing by sending both teams along with Denver, the solution that was created was to see what the scores of both teams would be after all six routines were counted. Personally, I think that idea was a ridiculous solution because that goes against the entire purpose of putting six athletes in the lineup and taking five scores. Although nobody got hurt in their routines during this competition, if someone were to, and one team had to count a zero while the other team got to count a score of 9.9, that team has a huge advantage even though there was nothing that could have prevented the injury. Needless to say, because of this unconventional way of scoring, Michigan came up short in the numbers and LSU was awarded second place. 

I am disappointed to say the least that Michigan was not able to continue its run on the road to NCAA Nationals, but I am looking forward to seeing how far the Wolverines make it next year. Although the season ended for the team as a whole, I am eager to see how their three individual competitors do on the big stage. Maybe these ladies can get some revenge and due justice for the maize and blue this time around.