After the women's gymnastics team won the Northeast Regional Championship this past Saturday night, the team's coaching staff was up late into the night.

But it was not your typical celebration.

Coach Judi Avener and assistants Jessica Strunck and Steve Shephard were holed up in their offices, trying to calculate where the Lady Lions would be seeded at the NCAA Championships in St. Paul, Minn., on April 24-25.

Sometime in the middle of the night, the coaches tallied the numbers, discovering that Penn State would be the fifth seed at the NCAAs for the second consecutive year.

"I'm thrilled to death because that's been our goal all season long," Avener said. "That's what we worked for all year -- to make that happen."

The Lady Lions, by posting one of the top six national qualifying scores, will compete in the late rotation --which includes the top six seeds.

"Competitively we'll go head to head with the best teams in the country," Avener said.

She added that the judges often award higher scores to those teams in the second rotation, since those are supposedly that nation's best teams.

"It would have been harder to get excited if we had been in the second half," junior Allison Barber said. "It's harder to motivate ourselves because we know that the scoring isn't as high."

"In a two-session meet, you're saying to the judges, 'Here are the first six and here are the great six,' " said Arizona Coach Jim Gault, whose team is seeded fourth.

The Lady Lions' seeding will afford them the opportunity to compete in the order to which they are accustomed: vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise.

"Because we're used to doing the routine of that order (at every home meet), it makes us feel more comfortable," Barber said. "Doing it in that way kind of gets to be a pattern or a rhythm."

Penn State, a surprising fifth seed at last year's NCAAs, ended up true to form as the No. 5 team in the nation. The Lady Lions were ranked 12th going into last year's Northeast Regionals.

But that was then.

"Last year it was just exciting to be there," Barber said. "This year people expect a little bit more, we expect a lot more and in that way we can achieve a lot more."

"People are not quite as surprised this year," Avener added. "People were really surprised when we came out fifth in the meet (last year)."

This year, Pac Ten teams comprise half of the field, which once again has many coaches questioning the strength of the Northeast Region.

"The Northeast Region has got a lot of teams but not a lot of typically strong teams," Gault said.

He added that many schools in the Northeast have trouble recruting competitively, "with the exception of Penn State -- there's such a gymnastics tradition there."

And while Penn State is champion of the Northeast Region, that often doesn't hold much weight with the rest of the country. Although the region qualified many individuals, Penn State is the only team from the Northeast Region to qualify for the NCAAs.

"I still think we get a bum rap," Avener said. "(Last year) we tried to carry the torch for the Northeast Region. People said the region wasn't good and wasn't that strong."

Barber agreed that Penn State will represent the Northeast.

"Most definitely," she said. "We really want to go out and represent the region well. We have pride in the region we are in."