After tying the school's record score last week, the MSU women's gymnastics team wants to break that record on Saturday in its final home meet of the season.
The No. 22 Spartans (8-9) have won their past two competitions and are preparing to face Ohio State and West Virginia.
Coach Kathie Klages is confident the team will break the 196.575 record score this season.
"I personally think that this group of young women can break our school record, which I think is really an exciting situation for them to be in," Klages said. "If we don't get it done this weekend at home, we still have the ability to do it on the road, which would be even a greater feat."
This week's meet marks the third-consecutive home meet for the Spartans before heading to the road for three straight, followed by the Big Ten Championships. In the past five meets, the team has scored more than 195.00.
"The score we got last weekend was excellent; we were very pleased with that," co-captain Sarah Alexander said. "But we know that we have a lot more potential to do much greater things."
Alexander, a sophomore from North Carolina, took first in the beam event last week and set a personal season-best on the vault, resulting in a three-way tie for second place with teammates Jaime Miles and Victoria Iakounina.
"At the beginning of the season, we started out with decent scores, but not anything we were satisfied with by any means," Alexander said. "We've done a lot of building up from that point."
The team has improved its team score each meet for the past four weeks. Its national ranking also has jumped to No. 22 after being left out of the GymInfo preseason coaches poll.
Klages said the team has made various improvements this year that will help them in pursuit of the regional championships.
"I judge a lot of their routines in practices so we can focus right in on the errors that they're making and try to make corrections," she said. "This team has responded extremely well, with strong effort in making those corrections.
"They see the score prove it in a competition and they're even more excited to come in and work harder the next week to get an even better score."
Although Ohio State has won the last nine matchups versus the Spartans and West Virginia has taken the last two, Miles, an MSU sophomore, said because the team has done a good job of coming together, they are confident about improving each week.
"We had better team unity as the season went on and I think that helped with the team score on Saturday," she said. "As a team, we need to just keep everyone confident and go out there and do the best we can do."
The action begins at 7 p.m. Saturday at Jenison Field House.
