Women's NCAAs This Week

The NCAA Championships for both men and women will be held later on this week. Both meets should be very exciting to watch -- there's a lot of parity among the top NCAA programs so the competitions should be very close. The women's meet is in Lincoln, Nebraska, with the following schools competing a full team:

1. Georgia / 2. Utah / 3. Alabama / 4. Stanford / 5. LSU / 6. Florida / 7. UCLA / 8. Oregon State / 9. Oklahoma / 10. Arkansas / 12. Penn State / 14. Illinois*

*Teams qualify to NCAAs based on a top two placement at Regionals, while rankings are based on the team scores throughout the year. Therefore, teams such as Auburn (#11) and Nebraska (#13) miss qualifying, despite a higher overall ranking than Illinois. A list of individual competitors not with a team can be found here.



Schedule: The preliminary day of competition (April 16) is split into two sessions of six teams each. The top three teams from each session qualify to the Super Six team finals (April 17), where a team champion is decided. The all-around champion is also crowned during the preliminary day -- it's the gymnast with the highest all-around score of the two sessions. Finally, competition on the individual events will be held on Saturday, the 18th.

Gymnasts to watch: 2004 Olympians Courtney Kupets and Courtney McCool (Georgia); 2008 all-around bronze medalist Kristina Baskett (Utah); 2008 Canadian Olympian Elyse Hopfner-Hibbs (UCLA); and former US elite stand-outs Corey Hartung and Melanie Sinclair (Florida), Susan Jackson (LSU), Grace Taylor (Georgia) and many others. Who's your favorite NCAA gymnast?

Media coverage: The women's Super Six meet will air on CBS on May 9 at 2pm ET. More information on NCAAs can be found on the Nebraska website.

Next: The men's roster and championship info