The Bruins sit just outside of the top 10 teams heading into week three of the NCAA gymnastics season.

On Sunday, they will have a chance to enter that upper echelon in their third straight quad meet against top-ranked teams.

“I love getting on the floor with other great teams,” said coach Janelle McDonald. “There’s a lot to take away from the way they do things and the way they show up and compete.”

No. 11 UCLA gymnastics will compete against No. 1 Oklahoma, No. 10 Denver and Stanford in its third meet of the season, a week after a narrow .050 margin kept the team in third behind No. 8 LSU at the Sprouts Farmers Market Collegiate Quad.

In a sport where such thin margins are common, junior Emily Lee said the Bruins’ main focus in practice has been minimizing the little deductions that can end up making a big impact.

“We’re really focused on being present in every single thing we do,” Lee said. “The habits you build are going to translate to what you need.”

One area in which the Bruins have already shown an improvement is vault, where their No. 11 ranking was their lowest of any apparatus in 2023.

The addition of graduate student Nya Reed and freshman Katelyn Rosen’s 10.0 start values enabled UCLA to climb to a No. 3 ranking on vault after the first two weeks.

Small improvements, such as a stick from Lee that led to a career-high 9.900, have proven beneficial for the team. Lee said her disappointment with her lower scores last season drove her to work harder during the off-season.

“I was just frustrated, I was not producing the scores,” Lee said. “This year, … on every landing I do, I’m really focused on, ‘OK, if you’re going to compete this one, how do you want to land and how do you want it to happen? How do you want it to look? How do you want it to feel?’”

In contrast to vault, beam is currently the Bruins’ lowest-ranked event at No. 29 in the nation, with four sub-9.700 scores in the first two meets.

Graduate student Emma Andres, who made her competitive debut on beam Saturday, said the Bruins aren’t concerned with their rocky showing in the early part of the season.

“We have a great beam squad, and we’ve hit almost every single time,” Andres said. “The only thing we really need to work on is just our nerves and trusting our training.”

Sunday’s meet is UCLA’s final quad meet until the Pac-12 championships on March 23, as well as its final time competing against nonconference teams until Clemson comes to Pauley Pavilion a week earlier on March 16.

McDonald said the high-pressure environment of quad meets allows the Bruins to build skills that will enable them to succeed throughout the season in preparation for later on in the season.

“It’s really beneficial to be up against great teams because it shows us the areas that we need to get a little bit stronger at, more dialed in on, so that we can continue to push to be the best we can be at the end of season,” McDonald said.

The Bruins, Sooners, Pioneers and Cardinal will begin competition at 1 p.m. on Sunday.