After the No. 4 Oregon Ducks (2-1) fell to the No. 1 Baylor Bears, the team took a week off from the competition, and faced a series of challenges and lessons learned as they returned to the mat against Gannon University (2-4).
“We have a little bit of more fun in the bye weeks, and so it's not that the focus isn’t there, it's just a little bit of like we can breathe,” head coach Taylor Susnara said. “So sometimes that can create a little bit of lax, even though they are not meaning to. I think we just had a few things go wrong today.”
Pressure intensified as a series of bobbles and falls led the Ducks to recording three season low scores in the first half of the meet.
“We can’t change what happened in the first half but at the end of the day we say leave it there and go 0-0 heading into the next heat,” Susnara said. ”It is what it is.”
Freshman Morgan Willingham fell to the pressure of the moment. In the compulsory tumbling event, she got confused with the counts and omitted a required skill. But Willingham did not let this mistake define her and bounced back in her individual tumbling open-single pass heat to score a season high of 9.875.
“Being a freshman and coming out in a solo heat is a lot of pressure, and after messing up in the beginning, it can kind of create some nerves,” Susnara said. “I think she did a really good job turning it around.”
Something clicked for Oregon and a switch was flipped to fire up the second half. The Ducks outscored the Knights in four of six events, including a dominant 58.025-53.175 performance in tumbling, making it their highest score in the event since 2017.
The Ducks fought through mental strength to put a greater than five margin in the team events to win over the Knights 276.565 to 263.465.
“We really worked really hard on it this bye week,” Susnara said. “All in all, I was happy with it but I think we still have a lot of work to do.”
With lessons learned from the bye week, the Ducks will host Mary Hardin-Baylor next Friday, March 14 for their last home meet of the regular season.