The Illinois men’s gymnastics team will travel to the West Coast this weekend to compete against No. 8 California. After testing Illinois head coach Justin Spring’s new format last weekend, the Illini will return to the regulation five-up, five-count.

“It was a good switch-up because now we are back to the gymnastics daily grind, which is just knocking out numbers and routines,” Spring said. “That is where we are at in our training, and it can be mentally frustrating because it is monotonous. Last week gave us a good spin on our training, and now we are back to our old ways, but it is still something new.”

The five-up, five-count format recently went into effect at the beginning of March. Illinois has only competed the new format once so far this season because of the head-to-head format used in last weekend’s competition. The Illini will have to adjust quickly to the time change in California before competing Saturday. Senior Josh Wilson said the time zone change will just be another factor the Illini adapt to.

“We don’t put too much weight into how much the jet lag and time change will affect us,” he said. “We know we have to get up at 4 a.m. anyway to travel, so we just dump it all in with the extra added pressure of life. We don’t think, ‘Oh, we are going to have a bad meet because of traveling.’ We just think of it as starting facing a different way on an event.”

The new format cuts one member of the team from each event lineup. The competitive nature during practice intensified the first week this format was introduced.

“I’m always going to have troubles with these lineups,” Spring said. “We’ve got some depth on a couple of events and it’s not going to go away. … Everyone is hitting good routine and coming within a couple of 10ths in practices. You can look at past competitive experience. You can look at how the practice went, but every thing pushes and pulls one way. There is never an easy answer.”

Illinois is making its own spring break vacation after the team’s competition Saturday by taking an extended stay.

The Illini will stay in California a few extra days, but the majority of their time will be spent training in gyms.

“It’s going to be nice to get away from school for a while and only focus on gymnastics,” sophomore Mike Wilner said. “Being in California is pretty nice too.”

Illinois is ranked No. 6, behind Big Ten competitors No. 1 Penn State, No. 2 Michigan and No. 4 Ohio State. The Big Ten Championships are only a few weeks away with the NCAA Championships following immediately.

“Depending on what side of the bracket we are on for NCAAs, we might have to beat out a very strong team to make it to second day. Not that we are overly worried about that. We are pretty confident we are a good team, but in this format, anything can happen.”

California has recently been struggling with funding for its men’s gymnastics program. Without the proper funds, the program was unable to persuade a lot of top recruits over the past few years. Spring said the team is going into this weekend to compete against itself.

“We are competing for a score,” he said. “They have been struggling with funding and don’t have full-endowed scholarships, so they have a weaker freshmen and sophomore class. They were able to pull in a very big class. I don’t know how refined they are, but I’m challenging the team to push the score.

“We went 430.00 last weekend, and we need to be pushing 440 and above. I’d like to see the team rise to the occasion.”