If people were to stumble into Kenney Gymnasium on the northeast side of campus anytime in the past week, they may have been surprised not only by what they saw — a cluster of gymnasts performing various tricks on the second floor of what appears to be, from the outside, a normal campus hall — but also by what they heard.

In preparation for a loud environment this Saturday at No. 2 Michigan, the Illinois women’s gymnastics team has been practicing with artificial crowd noise.

“We have been trying to recreate the feeling of competition in practice so that we can translate how great we look in practice into the meets,” senior Alina Weinstein said. “Sometimes we’ll throw on some crowd music — it’s a CD that literally claps the whole time — and other times we’ll all gather around and cheer as loud as we can for somebody that’s going and try to create that meet feel and put them on the spot.”

Illinois should have success, she added, as long as its nerves are under control.

“I don’t really think that our first meet really represented what we’re capable of,” Weinstein said. “We have a lot of talent on our team and a lot of the mistakes we made (at our last meet) were really uncharacteristic. They were due to the nerves that we encountered last week. As long as we learn from our mistakes, this meet will go much smoother.”

Illinois had some falls in its season-opening meet at Arizona last Saturday, which led to a third-place finish.

The Illini will face a common foe in Michigan. Last year the Wolverines beat the Illini in their regular season meeting and the Big Ten Championships, both by no more than .525 points.

“Michigan is always looking good and is always one of our biggest rivals,” senior Jaclyn Kantecki said. “But we have to focus on ourselves while we’re there and pay attention to our own gymnastics and we should be good.”

Illinois will have a tough task in beating Michigan this year. The Wolverines are off to their best start in school history, averaging 196.738 points per meet. The Illini totaled 193.750 points in their first meet. The Wolverines feature the reigning Big Ten Women’s Gymnast of the Week in Joanna Sampson, who won the all-around title last week against Nebraska.

“It’s a great Michigan team that has a lot of talent,” Illinois head coach Kim Landrus said. “But we also have a lot of talent on our squad. We just have to go and compete our hearts out and do what we know how to do.”

Landrus added that the team is only focusing on the factors it can control.

“It’s really important that we focus on ourselves and execute our routines as flawlessly as possible. If we do that, we’ll walk out of Crisler Center extremely happy,” she said.

The team agreed that to have success it must have conviction.

“We just have to go in there with confidence.” Kantecki said. “We know we’ve done more than enough work and are more than prepared for this meet, so we just have to go there and hit our routines just like we do in the gym.”

Nicholas can be reached at [email protected] and @IlliniSportsGuy.