When No. 4 Florida faces off against No. 16 Auburn tonight at 8, the team will be wary of a letdown.
The Gators (5-2, 4-1 Southeastern Conference) are coming off their best team performance, and arguably their biggest win of the season, after beating rival Georgia in Gainesville for the first time since 1990.
But that was last week, and while the victory helped boost the team’s confidence, coach Rhonda Faehn made sure the gymnasts realized it was just one meet and the team still has a lot left to accomplish.
“That meet was great, but it’s done now, and we need to focus on the rest of the season,” Faehn said. “I was pretty hard on them on Monday. I certainly wasn’t going to accept a bad practice because we think we did so well. I gave them a harder assignment.”
That assignment was closing out the SEC schedule on a high note against Auburn (2-4, 2-3 SEC), which Faehn said always seems to have its best competition of the year when the Gators visit.
Florida is 2-2 in its last four trips to Auburn, and the meets have been decided by half a point or less, including a Florida loss by one-tenth of a point in Faehn’s first visit there as UF’s coach in 2004.
While the meets have been close against the Tigers, the team’s focus is to come away with a good road score to count toward its season total in order to drop the 195.475 it scored against N.C. State.
“We’ve been building and building after each competition, so we have to fix the mistakes we made against Georgia,” senior Maranda Smith said.
Of those mistakes, Faehn said the Gators had only one stuck landing each on vault and bars, and three on beam.
In a perfect world, she would like to see at least 75 percent of the landings stuck for the team to improve its scores and avoid a disappointment against Auburn.
“I don’t expect a letdown,” Smith said. “We’ve been training so hard that I expect for us to go in there and do well and come home with a win.”
