(Chris Detrick | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah's Kim Tessen competes on the bars during the gymnastics meet against Brigham Young University Friday, January 5, 2018.
The middle of the first meet of Utah gymnast MyKayla Skinner’s sophomore season went almost perfectly. The start and finish were just wobbly enough that a teammate tied her for Friday’s all-around title.
That can only be good for the Utes, who posted 197.0 points to BYU’s 194.275 at the Huntsman Center.
Anything that keeps Skinner motivated and interested as a college gymnast is an encouraging development for Utah. The intrasquad competition that MaKenna Merrell-Giles and other Utes already are providing in 2018 will drive her and this No. 5-ranked team to bigger things. Having teammates rise to Skinner’s level in her best events, even with the mild disclaimer of a cold and congestion that kept her coughing through the post-meet news conference, is a positive sign.
Skinner shared the all-around victory with Merrell-Giles at 39.475. “When one of her teammates ties her, I do think the friendly rivalry is healthy for the team,” Ute co-coach Tom Farden said.
In April, before Skinner finished second in the all-around competition in the NCAA Championships as a freshman, Pac-12 Networks analyst Samantha Peszek wondered how the rest of Skinner’s Utah career would unfold. “My biggest fear for MyKayla is she will get too bored,” said Peszek, a former Olympic and collegiate gymnast. “I’m curious to see how she can keep college gymnastics exciting for herself and stay motivated. I can’t imagine what she’s going to accomplish in the next three years.”
If this is what boredom looks like, the Utes can expect more good stuff from Skinner. She took a little hop on the landing of her vault and stepped out of bounds in her floor routine. That partly explained why teammates Tiffani Lewis and Kim Tessen finished ahead of her on the first rotation and Utah’s Merrell-Giles, Lewis, Missy Reinstadtler and Sydney Soloski and BYU’s Kyleigh Greenlief topped her in the last event.
In between, Skinner’s 9.90 marks were winning scores. “It was fun to kind of shine on bars and beam,” she said, “because those are my weaker events.”
Known for showing a lot of emotion after her routines, Skinner clearly was thrilled with her bars effort and happily relieved after the beam performance. The crux of her beam routine is described as “a switch leg leap to a straddle jump to a tuck back,” and she made it work.
“I think the fans will be pretty surprised with that,” she said before a training session this week, “because it’s a pretty cool combination.”
With a 10.0 scoring limit in college gymnastics, unlike international competition, difficulty is not rewarded as much as execution. That naturally takes some of the fun and the challenge out of the sport for Skinner, but she compensated with her own experimenting in the offseason.
“In the summer, I got to throw some big skills again for fun, just for fun,” Skinner said. “I still get the summer to go and play around … it keeps me young in gymnastics, so I haven’t got to the point of [bordeom] yet.”
Skinner arrived at Utah in October 2016 after the weird experience of being the No. 1 alternate for the U.S. Olympic team. In Rio, she trained with the other two alternates in an auxiliary gym, where a rat emerged through the floorboards, and they didn’t receive gold medals as their teammates did.
The 2020 Games might be in her future, though. USA Gymnastics officials may reconfigure the team with a couple of event specialists, Skinner said. So at age 23, she could compete in Tokyo on vault, for example.
That’s getting ahead of the story. Skinner’s Ute career will end in 2020, and there’s a lot to appreciate about her between now and then. She’ll get healthy, her teammates will keep pushing her and the 2018 Utes may well fulfill their ambitions beyond last year’s NCAA fifth-place finish. After hitting 197 in the opener, Farden said, “From where this team’s goals are, it was a fitting start.”
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