AMES, Iowa — It's only been a couple weeks since the Cyclones gymnasts' season began, but they've already made a lot of progress.
"Stepping out into Hilton in our first meet and how good we are from the very beginning is so exciting and I can just see us going up from here," said junior Hannah Loyim.
"As a team, we do have big goals this year," added freshman Ella Schell. "We do want to make it to regionals, and I think with what we're doing now, we're set to do that."
Since her arrival, their head coach Ashley Miles Greig has raised the bar for her team.
She may be a first-time head coach, but she knows what it takes to get to the top of the mountain in collegiate gymnastics.
During her college career, Greig was a four-time NCAA champion at Alabama and was the 2006 Honda Award winner which is given to the National Gymnast of the Year.
"What I try to instill in them and grab from my experience is confidence," Greig said. "I try to build these athletes up as much as I can every single day to where that they take that on internally and when you have that, when you can trust your training and you're confident, when the judge raises their hand and tells you it's time to go, I mean the rest can be history."
Her athletes have really taken to that championship mindset.
"Being able to have her mindset feed on to us has been great," Loyim said. "She just builds a really strong team that not only works together as teammates and gymnasts but as a family."
Having already achieved at the highest level as a collegiate gymnast, Greig is now aiming to do that as a coach.
"I want people when they think of Cyclone gym to think of excellence," Greig said. "We've set standards. We've agreed to certain things, and I think we're just holding these athletes to a different accountability level, and it's been really good to see how they've responded to that. The trajectory of this program and what we can accomplish, we haven't even seen a quarter of that yet."
Iowa State's next meet is on Friday, Jan. 19 at 6:30 p.m. against No. 26 BYU at Hilton Coliseum.