AIMING FOR HISTORY
Yul Moldauer hopes to lead OU to fourth-straight NCAA championship
A few days before leaving for the NCAA Championship weekend in Chicago, Oklahoma gymnast Yul Moldauer put in a load of laundry.
As water filled the basin and the wash cycle started to churn, thoughts flooded the junior’s mind.
Just a few months ago, he wasn’t sure the Sooners would end up here, on the precipice of a fourth consecutive national championship.
The team was young and had a lot of holes to fill with the departure of a solid veteran group following the 2017 season.
“We came in here with such a new set of guys, guys that have never competed from last year and they had to fill in those roles,” Moldauer said. “And we were nervous. Who’s going to come back from injuries? Who’s going step up?”
Throughout the course of their fourth consecutive undefeated season, the Sooners have more than answered those questions.
“I think once we clicked, that’s when we started going and finding our rhythm,” Moldauer said. “It’s very special to realize our coaches told us, ‘I don’t know if you guys are going win’ to now, ‘I know we can we win if we do our job.’”
In Moldauer’s mind, the team started to come together after the season-opening meet at Michigan. It wasn’t supposed to be their first meet of the year, but the government shutdown forced Air Force to cancel the Jan. 20 meet.
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Sooners had to rally from a near four-point deficit after the first two rotations to capture the first win of the season.
“After Michigan, we went in there and we saw what the field provided with the teams and all the other scores,” Moldauer said. “Once we came back, we knew that we could be on their level or even better.”
But Coach Mark Williams saw another unifying force on the team.
“It felt a little bit like we had to start over to some degree,” Williams said. “The fact that we still had Yul, who’s probably the best gymnast we have in collegiate gymnastics right now was kind of a constant.
“So eventually, we started to get people to rally around Yul.”
Moldauer spent his junior year splitting his time between NCAA competition and stints on the international stage with USA Gymnastics, preparing for a run at the 2020 Olympics.
In March, Moldauer won his second American Cup gold in Chicago, and before that, he won the all-around title at the P&G Gymnastics Championships in Anaheim, California. He also took the bronze in his first appearance at the World Championships in Montreal, Canada.
Despite all of his accomplishments, Moldauer didn’t have a completely smooth season. A back injury hindered him in the final weeks of the regular season and kept him from competing in the Ohio State meet.
“We shut him down for a couple of weeks,” Williams said. “It was a little scary, just having him come back from that and knowing that we didn’t want to re-trigger something that would cause the injury to come back.”
But he bounced back at the MPSF Championships with first-place finishes in floor, pommel horse, still rings, parallel bars and all-around — setting a school record for the most titles in a single conference championship.
Now, he’ll attempt to go for another slew of titles on Saturday night, less than a week since he sat in front of his washing machine and thought about everything it took for him and his team to get there.
“I was just like thinking about all of the things we’ve come through this year and how much closer this team has become,” Moldauer said. “It’s more of a family. And I’m just ready to go out there and compete with my boys.”