The flight home was a long one.

For the second week in a row, the men’s gymnastics team underperformed and suffered in another meet that “just wouldn’t click,” head coach Yoshi Hayasaki said.

The team finished fifth out of six teams this weekend in the Pacific Coast Classic, a meet that featured five of the nation’s top six teams.

After finishing second to Stanford earlier this year at the Windy City Invitational, Illinois was glad to get another shot at the top-ranked team, but the Illini had to fight with inconsistency again as they did against the Nittany Lions last week.

“We just never kept things rolling,” Hayasaki said about the team’s lack of momentum during the meet. “If we hit one routine it seemed like the next guy was missing. The level of concentration, the intensity level, I don’t know, it wasn’t there. We weren’t able to bring ourselves back to where we are capable of performing.”

The men pushed themselves physically this past week after the disheartening loss to Penn State in preparation for the competition that they knew would be present at the Classic – something that may have yielded mixed results.

“I think it’s because we have been training so much that our bodies are starting to break down a little bit more,” senior Tyler Yamauchi said. “We’re in that slump phase of training, but our bodies will starting getting used to it and recovering better.”

While senior Wes Haagensen echoed Yamauchi’s sentiments on training, he is still trying to figure out a solid explanation as to what is holding the team back.

“I don’t know if there’s too much pressure on people or if people are working too hard during the week or what,” Haagensen said. “It could have been the traveling situation and the time change, but when it’s time to compete, people need to get that competitive edge.”

Whether or not distance played a role in its performance, Illinois wasn’t looking to use that as a crutch for the team’s performance, one it was less than pleased with.

“We were just a disaster,” Paul Ruggeri said. “It was kind of a fluke, maybe our bodies weren’t used to the time change. But we were really inconsistent, much worse than last week.”

But if there is any sort of geographic advantage in play, it is one that the team will have to overcome before the NCAA Championships – which will be back in California.

“The thing is, NCAAs are at Stanford,” Haagensen said. “If the geographical thing is a factor, we’re going to have to work on it somehow, because this isn’t going to cut it.”