I've been covering Cal Baseball on this blog under the title "The Last Season," but of course it looks to be the last one for the men's gymnastics squad as well. As it happens, the gymnasts will end up just sort of their centennial; the team traces its beginnings to 1912. Assuming nothing changes, there are two remaining chances for fans to see the Bears compete at home in Harmon Gym: tomorrow against #10 Iowa and on the 25th against #1 Stanford. Cal is currently ranked third.
Mind you, there are only 17 men's teams left in the NCAA. And the only other team on the West Coast is Stanford, which explains why Cal competes against its South Bay rival so often. (The meet on the 25th will be the fourth time the two teams will have competed this year.) When I talked about the cuts with Tim McNeil, the first-year head coach and former national champion at Cal, he expressed concerns not only for his squad's fate but the fate of Stanford and the conference to boot.
[Stanford is] going to have to fly to all of their meets, which is going to be a lot harder on them. But the bigger thing is our conference, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation. If we go, that only leaves Stanford, Oklahoma, Air Force, and Nebraska. And Nebraska’s going to the Big 10 and Air Force is joining another conference on the East Coast with Army and Navy. So that’s two schools left in the MPSF. You can’t have a conference tournament with only Oklahoma and Stanford. It would be a dual meet.
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