After coming off a season-high score, a win against Michigan State and a jump back into the top 25 in last weekend’s Pink Meet, one would assume that the Illinois women’s gymnastics team hit its best routines.

The team doesn’t think so.

Although the No. 19 Illini were almost perfect in hitting their 196.125 against Michigan State, they still see room for some minor improvements in routines for their meet Friday against No. 7 Nebraska.

“We look good as a team,” senior Alina Weinsteinsaid. “We’re coming off of a pretty big score and a pretty good win, but we feel that we didn’t even do our best routines, so it’s a good stepping point, and we just want to go out there confident and do our gymnastics.”

For the Illini to continue their success and achieve the goal of beating both their high score and the Cornhuskers this weekend, the team believes that it will all come down to the little things.

“We’re continuing to work on the small details as we do every week because that is what separates good teams from great teams,” sophomore Sunny Kato said. “We are working on our handstands and sticking our dismounts and all the minor things to make our routines great.”

Weinstein agrees.

“We’re hitting now and we’re doing good routines, but we need to focus on sticks and not giving away small deductions on handstands on bars or small wobbles on beam so we’re working on fine-tuning those things,” Weinstein said.

Illinois will face one of its toughest opponents of the season when it steps into the Bob Devaney Center. 

After winning the Big Ten Championship last year, Nebraska has started this season 2-1 with two straight wins over Michigan State and Ohio State after a season-opening loss to Michigan.

The Cornhuskers enter the meet with a season-average score of 196.383 and a season-high score of 196.700 against the Spartans. Nebraska is also ranked in the top 15 in all individual events and features Big Ten beam, floor and all-around champion Emily Wong on its roster.

The talent on Nebraska has the Illini eager to compete.

“They’re an amazing team,” Kato said. “They’re always one of the best preforming teams in the Big Ten and we’re excited to compete against them.”

Illinois, like Nebraska, has improved in each of its first three meets as well. The Illini started slowly with some uncharacteristic falls in their season-opening quad meet in which they finished third. From there, Illinois improved dramatically against Michigan and just last week defeated Michigan State.

“I think it’s always great to be a top-25 team,” head coach Kim Landrus said. “Our goal is to be a seeded team going into regionals, which is top 18 and it would be nice to get one of the top-12 coveted spots and be a top-two seed, but as I said we’re just taking it one step at a time, knowing that we need to progress every weekend to reach our goals.”

Landrus added that the team’s goals are simple. The group just wants to keep improving.

“We need to add on to what we did last weekend,” Landrus said. “We need to go out and have 24 strong performances, get all the little details right, use this as another opportunity to get better and we’ll be just fine.”

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