‘This one’s big.’ Kentucky gymnastics returns with Excite Night at Rupp Arena.
After a highly successful 2021 season that saw the UK gymnastics team record a fouth-place finish at the Southeastern Conference Championships, match the best team score in program history in its season finale at an NCAA regional finals and send two individual competitors to the NCAA Championships semifinals, the Wildcats are ready to compete again.
Ranked No. 13 in the country in the preseason Women’s Collegiate Gymnastics Association poll, Kentucky’s season-opening meet at Arizona State was first postponed, then canceled, last week with the UK team already in Arizona due to COVID-19 issues in the Arizona State program.
As such, the Wildcats will begin their season at home at 7 p.m. Friday with the annual Excite Night meet inside Rupp Arena, although COVID has again altered plans.
The Wildcats were supposed to face Georgia — an SEC rival that UK has never beaten in a head-to-head setting — on Excite Night, but it was announced Thursday afternoon that COVID issues in the Georgia program meant it was no longer coming to Lexington.
Instead, UK will open its 2022 gymnastics season against Ball State.
“It’s the meet we circle on our calendar every year,” UK gymnastics Coach Tim Garrison, now in his 11th season at UK, said of Excite Night.
This season, UK returns all 24 routines from last season’s NCAA Salt Lake City Regional finals. Those routines produced a 197.600 score that tied the UK program’s all-time scoring record, but fell just short of sending UK as a team to the NCAA Championships semifinals.
Garrison said vault and bars are expected to be strong points for UK. Those two events will be the first two for UK at each meet, alternating between vault first when UK is at home and bars first when UK is on the road.
Beam and floor exercise are the other two events.
“I’m looking forward to having great starts at our competitions this year,” Garrison said. “Being able to get out of the gate pretty fast to be able to have two solid rotations behind us before we move on to beam and floor.”
On beam, Garrison said that despite preseason preparation for the event, the mental approach to performing a good routine is different in a meet setting.
“We can do a lot of different things that we do to throw their concentration off and they can come through that with flying colors,” Garrison said. “Then you get into a meet situation where you’re in a big room and the lights go up and the fans are there cheering and everything’s in place and it’ll be interesting to see how they respond to that.”
Leading the way among UK’s experienced returnees are junior Raena Worley and sophomore Bailey Bunn.
Worley was an All-SEC selection last season who had three first-place finishes on bars, four on floor and six in all-around last season.
Worley qualified for the NCAA Championships semifinals as an individual on vault and said she’s spent the offseason polishing details of her routine, such as handstands, that could have given away points in the past.
“It definitely gave me a different point of view . . . I learned a lot about taking experiences in and really trusting my gymnastics just knowing that I’ve trained so long for it,” Worley said of reaching the NCAA Championships as an individual. “Being able to go into the competition confident was a big step, especially with such high-level competitors at the meet.”
“Going into the season I already feel like I am where I ended last year,” Worley added.
Bunn was also an All-SEC selection last season as a freshman and reached the NCAA Championships semifinals as an individual on beam.
“This season I’ve kind of just been focusing on the whole team aspect. As an individual, I’m not worried about what titles I hold. I’m not really worried about if I win or anything,” Bunn said. “I’m just worried about my team. I just want to make sure that our team as a whole does good. That’s why I came here, to be on the team and have the team atmosphere, have the team support me and have me being able to pick them up as well.”
In addition to Bunn and Worley, seniors Josie Angeny, Anna Haigis and Arianna Patterson are All-SEC honorees from a season ago that are returning.
This season’s UK squad also features a new member of the coaching staff. In addition to Garrison and Rachel Garrison, Tim’s wife who serves as the associate head coach, Chad Wiest joined the team as an assistant coach who oversees UK on floor exercise and vault.
“Chad brings a different level of excitement,” Worley said, noting that Wiest helped build the team’s endurance during the offseason. “Having Chad’s enthusiasm on floor, like it’s so exciting to just go to floor every day and have that kind of energy . . . I think the team on floor is the strongest it’s ever been.”
The first chance for UK to compete this season carries plenty of significance.
UK’s opening meet of the season will be the first time the Wildcats compete inside Rupp Arena since January 2020 after Excite Night didn’t occur last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The last Excite Night event in January 2020 against Missouri drew nearly 12,000 fans to Rupp Arena to watch a UK victory.
“A lot of the first meet or two of the season, a lot of it’s discovery,” Garrison said. “It’s OK, here’s what we think we have, let’s see what we have and you don’t know until you’re put in that situation.”
“There’s a different type of drive on the team now,” Worley added. “We have unfinished business, I think is what the team has called it, with being so close last year (to reaching the NCAA Championships as a team) and so we came back and we haven’t stopped pushing since we started.”
Bunn said most of the UK team spent the summer training in Lexington and the goal of reaching the NCAA Championships — to be held in April at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas, — as a team remained front and center in their minds.
“We’ve got poise, we have strength, we have mentally tough girls. I mean, we kind of have it all,” Bunn said. “I think that nothing can really stop us from making it to nationals this year. We just have to keep that mentality going and keep the fire in us.”
Excite Night
No. 28 Ball State at No. 13 Kentucky
What: Season-opening meet for UK gymnastics
Where: Rupp Arena
When: 7 p.m. Friday
TV: SEC Network
This story was originally published January 13, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
