Pyrotechnics and smoke accompanied the men’s and women’s gymnastics teams as they were introduced to the crowd at St. John Arena Saturday night.

When all the smoke cleared, each team had secured a victory, but the reactions to the results were quite different.

“I’m actually disappointed with this performance,” men’s coach Miles Avery said after watching his team beat Illinois-Chicago 210.65-207.600. “We competed two weeks ago, and typically as our season goes along we progress every week, a little bit by a little bit, but this was a big step backwards for this team.”

Women’s coach Larry Cox had quite a different attitude after seeing his team squeak by Michigan State, 195.875-195.175.

“I’m really pleased,” Cox said. “It’s always fun to win, but what I’m really pleased about is that this is what this team is all about. The first two meets of the year they struggled as far as hitting routines — maybe a little because of nervousness — but they settled down tonight and did what they do every day in practice.”

While most coaches prefer to see their teams step up during competition and perform at a higher level than during practices, Cox just wants his team to perform as well in competition as it does every other day of the week.

After struggling through a disappointing season last year, Cox was pleased to see that trend finally come to an end this weekend.

“This has to help their confidence because they know how good they are,” Cox said. “They watch each other every day in practice and they’re flawless. To struggle in the first two meets, they could have said, ‘Oh no, we’re snake-bitten again, like last year,’ but they didn’t.”

The positive difference between this women’s team and the one last year is due in large part to the presence of some exceptional freshmen, including Jill Weber, who won the all-around competition Saturday night. Three other freshmen — Shelby Warner, Kaylin Schlecht and Emily Sineway — also made large contributions to the winning effort against the Spartans.

The men’s team, despite winning by a larger margin than the women, was not as enthusiastic about Saturday’s performance.

“We expected more out of ourselves,” senior Dick Huntwork said. “We didn’t produce what we wanted to, but we are happy in the sense that we fought through everything and did what we needed to do to come out on top.”

Part of the reason the team didn’t record as high a score as it hoped might be the fact that senior All-American Raj Bhavsar is recovering from a shoulder injury and didn’t compete.

Another reason might be that the team is trying to maintain focus after practicing at an above-average intensity all week.

“We expected to come away with a bigger win tonight, but everybody kind of struggled,” sophomore Kerry Adderly said. “It was the end of a long week and training has been really hard lately.”

From this point on, Avery intends to back down just a little bit to maintain energy level for the meets.

“We were really tired,” Avery said. “We’ve been training extremely hard; we have not slowed down one bit. The plan is, this was going to be the last week with this high level of intensity.”