Midwest Regional Preview

Gustavus Adolphus College will host this year's Midwest Regional Championship on their campus in St Peter Minnesota on Friday night March 8th at 6:00 pm. Gustavus has done a wonderful job of setting up a website with all kinds of information about the competition. Please visit this link.

The Midwest Region has been dominated by Wisconsin LaCrosse in the recent past and this year is no different then the others, although two teams seem poised to give LaCrosse a run for their money. The host school of Gustavus Adolphus College and Hamline University are both within stricking distance of the Eagles. The current NCGA rankings show only 1.1 separation between first place LaCrosse and third place Hamline. The biggest and brightest surprise this year in the NCGA is the team for UW-Whitewater. They are currently ranked fourth in the region and will be fighting to hold onto that fourth spot which will mean a trip to Ithaca College for the National Champions. Not to be discarded though is the team of UW-River Falls which is 1.2 behind Whitewater but has beaten Whitewater in all of their head-to-head competitions this year. River Falls will need to beat Whitewater by just .85 points in order to overtake the Warhawks for that coveted spot.

Defending NCGA All-Around champion Melissa Stanton from Hamline will be looking to win the all-around competition as she is having another marvelous year and is currently ranked first. Not far behind her though in second place is Gustavus' first-year student-athlete Amanda Parker who has been making waves, and Jennie Williams from UW-Oshkosh who won the WIAC Championships two weeks ago. The individual events are also up for grabs, well, all of them except for bars. Melissa Stanton has a bar routine far and above anyone else in the Midwest Region and if she hits she'll walk away with that title. On the other events though, it is Amanda Parker, Tiffany Reber (River-Falls) and Ann Kingsnorth (Whitewater) leading the way on vault. Angela Erato from LaCrosse is on top of beam followed by Stanton and Parker and on floor it is another Whitewater gymnast - April Hubmann closely followed by Nancy Petersen (LaCrosse) and Amanda Parker again. There are many other gymnasts on each of the events that has a shot at the title. It will all depend on who hits on Friday night.