April 5, 2001

COLUMBUS, Ohio - California men's gymnastics coach Barry Weiner had confidence going into the 2001 NCAA Championships saying, "The Cal team is just about ready to hit full stride. We haven't had a complete meet all season. At times we've done a couple of events well. Just recently at the conference championships, we did our bad events very well and our good events poorly. We feel if we all come together and the team is peaking at the right time, we're going to do the best we can to prevent Mark (Williams) and (the University of ) Oklahoma from winning the national championship."

On Thursday during the first session of the team qualifying, The fifth-ranked Cal men's gymnastics team qualified for the team finals by placing second with a season-best score of 214.550.

No. 1 Oklahoma won the afternoon competition with a score of 218.300. The Sooners were followed by Cal (214.550), Penn State (213.625), Illinois (212.050), Massachusetts (208.700) and Temple (203.400). The second session is composed of Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Iowa, Minnesota and Stanford.

The top three teams from each session advance to the team finals, which will be contested Friday night.

Cal sophomore Cody Moore, the 2001 MPSF all-around champion, had the top all-around score in the afternoon with a team season-best 54.100 total, more than a point better than runner-up Leo Oka of Illinois. In addition, sophomore Michael Ashe placed fifth with 52.150.

Golden Bears also had the high scores on three events. Andrew Hampy led the qualifiers with another team season-best score of 9.400 on the vault, while Moore had a 9.300 on parallel bars and Ashe scored 9.500 on the high bar.

After the meet, Weiner said, "We had a bad meet but we didn't fall apart. We hung together. Oklahoma can contend at their best. In order for us to contend, we will have to be at our very very best. I'm excited we advanced."

The team finals will start at 7 p.m. Friday and the individual event finals will begin at 7 p.m. Saturday.