Postseasons begin this weekend for Cal Women's Gymnastics and Cal Rugby
Both Cal squads are national championship contenders
After Cal Men’s Swimming and Diving placed 2nd at the NCAA Championships last Saturday, the next California Golden Bears to vie for national titles are Cal Women’s Gymnastics and Cal Rugby.
No.6 Cal Women’s Gymnastics (28-3), the 2024 NCAA runner-ups, are in the Alabama Regional this weekend. They will look to book a returning trip to the NCAA Championships in Fort Worth, Texas in two weeks. Cal would need to place in the top two of Friday’s session (“Second Round”) and then be a top two team in the Tuscaloosa Regional Final on Sunday.
Cal Rugby (11-1) earned the top seed in the West, allowing the Bears to host all postseason matches during their run until the D1A National Championship final in Indianapolis, Indiana on May 3rd. Bears host Colorado State on Saturday at 1 PM PT from Witter Rugby Field.
Let us take a closer look at both teams and their regular season.
Cal Women’s Gymnastics
With a roster dominated by seniors and freshmen, the best of the 2025 Cal Women’s Gymnastics might be to come in the coming weeks.
We know what the seniors could do (or more precisely what they had done last year in the postseason) and the untapped potential of the talented freshmen class is immense. Somehow, everything has not yet consistently come together so far this year for Cal to consistently flirt with that team score of 198+.
For the regular season, Cal is ranked 6th nationally with a National Qualifying Score (NQS which only considers the top-6 scores, three from the road, and is the average of the 6th-2nd best) of 197.605. Cal’s season best was 197.775 when 7 of the other top 8 had broken 198.0 at a meet this season.
The one consistent all season long has been the performance of senior Mya Lauzon, the ACC Gymnast of the Year (among way too many other accolades to list here). Still just a perfect 10 on the uneven bars short of a career “Gym Slam” (perfect 10s on all four apparatuses), Lauzon has already come through a few times in the clutch to allow Cal to “walk off” via a high score in the final routine of a meet (which was often floor since Cal was the top seed in most meets).
She did it in a spectacular fashion at home against Stanford with a perfect 10 for her floor routine.
Lauzon did it again at the “Elevate The Stage” meet on March 9th from Huntsville, Alabama.
By NQS, Lauzon with a 39.665 all-around score is ranked 7th nationally.
Cal usually has four all-arounders in the lineup, fellow senior Maddie Williams is ranked 15th by NQS with a score of 39.515. Just behind her, junior eMjae Frazier is ranked 17th at 39.510. Senior Ella Cesario is ranked 41st with 39.360.
Maddie Williams and Ella Cesario have both had great senior seasons, each earning an ACC Gymnast of the Week honor at one point. Maddie Williams has earned First Team All-American honor on bars for the past three years, currently ranked 4th nationally with a 9.945 bars NQS. Ella Cesario had taken advantage of Cal’s training facility improvement by upping her difficulties on a few events.
In 2024, eMjae Frazier was 3rd nationally in all-around score with 39.755. Mya Lauzon was 6th at 39.730. Perhaps some rule change in scoring is responsible for the slight drop in score in 2025. Nonetheless, eMjae Frazier not quite being the eMjae Frazier of the old (she set the bar enormously high) has limited Cal’s team scores this year. To be fair, Frazier was up quite often when the Bears already knew that they needed to drop an earlier low score. eMjae Frazier might have performed a little bit safer in those circumstances.
Should eMjae Frazier replicate what she did last postseason, Cal can very well return to not just the NCAA Championships (top 8 teams) but the NCAA Championships Final Session (top 4 teams).
Also replicating her success from last year, sophomore Kyen Mayhew consistently makes a statement with her vault and floor routines (which is the same music and most of the choreography as last year). She has also allowed teammate Miki Aderinto to style messages into her hair.
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Senior Jordan Kane was pressed into a larger role early in the season but then got hurt. While the Cal coaches had said in interviews that Kane was expected back, she was not in Cal’s ACC Championship lineup.
Fellow senior Abbey Scanlon has been a revelation on the balance beam since making her collegiate debut earlier this year. Overcoming injuries, Scanlon went from just an inspirational story of perseverance to a reliable 9.8-9.9 score on beam.
Junior Casey Brown is an East Bay native who has loved Cal since young. She finally got her chance to shine regularly this season after coming up in the clutch with some hit bars routines under tremendous pressure as an anchor after an already low score to drop. Brown is also in the Cal vault lineup at the ACC Championship in favor of Ella Cesario.
Also earning a spot onto the Cal lineup this year is sophomore Annalise Newman-Achee. She is now a reliable bars specialist and earned a 9.95 at the ACC Championships.
Three talented freshmen round out the Cal lineup. CJ Keuneke is now a regular on the floor exercise. Mya Wiley, who opened the year with spots in both bars and vault, gives Cal another 10.0 starting value vault but has ceded the bars spot to Casey Brown. The potential is sky-high for Mya Wiley in her collegiate career.
It took some waiting but freshman Ondine Achampong did make her collegiate debut. The Great Britain senior team member tore her ACL exactly a year ago tragically costing her the Olympic berth. She was able to train and perform on the beam about 10 months out when she made her collegiate debut. She will surely be an all-arounder next year.
What to look for:
Cal should survive and advance out of this weekend by scoring 197.8. that is an average of 9.89 on each scoring routine (only 5 of 6 routines in each rotation are counted). As much as one would love to see the 9.975 or even perfect 10’s, the meet will be more about not having to count any 9.7 scores. Cal having to count a 9.775 at the ACC Championship for floor exercise essentially allowed Stanford to take the ACC title.
Bears will face host No.11 Alabama (who Cal bested in Huntsville earlier this year), ACC frenemy North Carolina, and Iowa on Friday morning at 11 AM PT. All of the NCAA Regional sessions will be streamed on ESPN+.
Assuming that Cal Bears will advance out of that session to the regional final (most likely with host Alabama), Cal will need to earn a top-two spot against most likely host Bama, No.3 Florida, and No.14 Oregon State (with top All-Around gymnast this year in USA Olympian Jade Carey) on Sunday at 3 PM PT.
VS No. 11 Alabama, No. 22 UNC, No. 23 Iowa
Date: Friday, April 4, 2025
Time: 11 a.m. PT/1 p.m. CT
Location: Coleman Coliseum | Tuscaloosa, AL
Streaming/TV: ESPN+
Broadcasters: Bart Conner (PxP), Trinity Thomas (Color)
Live Scoring: Virtius
Regional Final
Date: Sunday, April 6, 2025
Time: 3 p.m. PT/5 p.m. CT
Location: Coleman Coliseum | Tuscaloosa, AL
Streaming/TV: ESPN+
Broadcasters: Bart Conner (PxP), Trinity Thomas (Color)
Live Scoring: Virtius
Cal Rugby
The most successful Cal program, Cal Rugby has not won a national championship since 2017 (when they won both the 15s and the 7s titles). The early part of that drought saw some heartbreaking loss in the championship final by one play.
After the COVID pandemic stopped rugby more than other (NCAA sponsored) sports and put Cal’s skills noticeably behind the curve, Golden Bears might finally be back in 2025 with a near perfect 11-1 record in the regular season.
Cal earned some big wins this year like the 49-24 win over the University of British Columbia on February 16th.
Bears’ lone loss came in Annapolis, Maryland in a shorthanded 3-27 loss to Navy, but the Bears have since bounced back by beating BYU 48-17 in Provo, Utah, Army 24-19 in Berkeley, and Saint Mary’s 48-45 in the regular season finale on March 22nd.
Saint Mary’s has replaced UBC (who had long ago replaced Stanford) as Cal Rugby’s main rival. This year’s hotly contested match in front of a sold-out home crowd was no different. The match was tied at 24 at the half before Cal went ahead by two tries. After SMC took the lead again with 69 minutes left, Cal’s junior Max Threlkeld scored his 3rd try of the match to give Cal the lead and the eventual win. Cal was able to avenge their quarterfinal postseason loss to SMC in 2024 when the Gaels eventually won the national championship.
Senior captain Charlie Walsh, junior Rand Santos with the speed/vision, junior Solomon Williams as a playmaker, and junior Cade Crist have all grown into better players this season in the little bit of Cal Rugby I got to watch this year. Santos and Williams have earned well-deserved nominations for the Scholz Award. No Cal Bears have won this prestigious award since its introduction in 2016 for the best male D1A rugby player in the country.
There is no denying that there is growing parity in collegiate rugby in the past decade. With that said, Cal by earning the top-seed should have a smooth sailing until the Western Regional Final on April 19th.
California Golden Bears are certainly one of the handful of sides that could win the D1A National Championship this year.
ROLL ON YOU BEARS!
Cal Women's Gymnastics takes Tuscaloosa Regional Session 1 with a team score of 197.550.
Cal and host Alabama will advance to Sunday's Regional Final (3 PM PT on ESPN+) with two teams from Session 2 tonight (most likely Florida and Oregon State).
Maddie Williams had a fantastic all-around performance with a score of 36.625 to edge teammate Mya Lauzon (39.575).
Results from Saturday: Cal Rugby 76, Colorado State 7
Cal Bears are through to the next round where the Bears will host Arizona (Cal defeated Arizona 46-0 in the regular season) who are coming off a road upset win at Cal Poly. The rest of the D1A postseason bracket all went to the home teams. This was expected given the parity in college rugby is more like 6 teams than 16 teams (the size of the postseason field).