Following the high of last season for Ball State Gymnastics, with a season record of 14-5-0 and placing second in the Mid-American Conference (MAC) Gymnastics Championships, the team is preparing for its first meet of the upcoming season Jan. 3.

With six new faces in the gym — five freshmen and one sophomore — the gymnasts have worked to build trust in themselves and one another as a team after a couple of their all-around competitors graduated in May.

“We’ve had these young women working hard and developing routines, but you’re going to get to see some fresh faces in the competition lineup,” head coach Joanna Saleem said. “I think they’re super passionate about what they’re doing. We’ve just got to get to the point where we’re getting out on the floor and being confident.”

Going into her 12th year coaching at Ball State, Saleem said each season throws the team things that are out of their control, so they aim to focus on things within their power. Things like setting goals and building trust in addition to their work in the gym.

“You can set a goal all day long, and unless you break down how you're going to get to that goal and how to achieve it, you're really just kind of operating without an owner's manual,” Saleem said. “We talk about the day-to-day, and so for me, the expectation is this team needs to be the best version of this team.”

The team got the chance to display their skills from practice in the annual Red vs. White scrimmage Dec. 9. Sophomore all-around Ashley Szymanski finished with the two highest scores of the night with a 9.875 on the uneven bars and a 9.850 on the balance beam.

While she said she thinks her performance makes her more confident going into the season, scores aren’t the only thing the team’s focused on.

“We don’t really look at scores very much, but I think knowing that helps me say, ‘OK, what I’ve been doing in the gym is working, it’s helping, so keep doing what I’m doing’” Szymanski said.

Graduate student all-around Hannah Ruthberg, sophomore all-around Ava Molina and senior all-around Grace Sumner rounded out the top scorers. Ruthberg with 9.800 on the uneven bars, Molina 9.725 on both the balance beam and floor and Sumner with 9.800 on the bars.

Overall, Ball State had 12 routines score 9.700 or higher in the scrimmage.

“I definitely know that there's stuff to improve on,” she said. “But I got out there, I got my floor routines done and I did my best to kind of lead those lineups the best way I knew how.”

Beyond acting as a snapshot of this year’s roster and the upcoming season, the scrimmage held personal importance to the Cardinals.

“I feel like for me, it was really, really exciting to see our gymnastics in the arena because a lot of the times it's really hard to transfer the stuff that you do in practice into a crazy arena like that, like the beautiful, huge Worthen Arena,” Ruthberg said. “The team did a really good job of seamlessly transferring a lot of our gymnastics into that arena.”

Going into its season, Ball State’s mainly focused on simple goals that’ll lead to the big picture and the personal goals of the gymnasts. The focus this year was integrating the new gymnasts into the team, while also developing the leadership of the returning gymnasts.

“I want to leave this team [with], ‘If you want it, you can have it,’” Rutherberg said. “You have to take the steps to get there, obviously, but embracing those steps, even when things get hard, staying positive and having fun every step of the way makes it easier… if I can leave that with them and have everybody embrace the positivity, and then embrace the suck of when things get hard, this team is just going to keep getting better and better.”

Saleem has seen the upperclassmen step up and help their incoming teammates acclimate saying they’ve done a “phenomenal job” of guiding the team into the season.

She said the thing that brings her back to loving her job is watching the development of the team every year and recognizing that “it’s a really hard thing to be a student athlete.

“They make a lot of sacrifices,” she said. “It takes a really special kind of person to come into that striving for perfection mentality. So for me, to look at them and see them being happy and developed and grow as they are getting ready to go out into the real world and the workforce, to me, that’s something I really enjoy, and that’s my goal: ‘How do I make you a better version of yourself?’”

The season officially begins Jan. 3 at 7 p.m. with a quad meet at the University of Missouri. The season-opening meet will be against Illinois State, Southeast Missouri State and the University of Missouri.

The first home-quad meet will be Jan. 12 at 1 p.m. in Worthen Arena against University of Illinois, Southeast Missouri State and Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Contact Ella Howell via email at ella.howell@bsu.edu.
Contact Hannah Amos via email at hannah.amos@bsu.edu or on X @Hannah_Amos_394.

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