John Lavallee has walked this road before.

At the start of the 2008 season, the UC Davis head women’s gymnastics coach fielded a squad with just one senior, one junior and 10 sophomores or freshmen. Michelle Kulovitz was the only senior in the season-opening lineup, as Carrie Lujan and Andi Dolinsky were sidelined with injuries.

Lavallee is probably feeling some déjà vu as the Aggies prepare for the 2012 campaign, which begins Friday at Arizona State. That’s because UCD’s roster includes only four gymnasts who competed as recently as two years ago: senior co-captain Erika Van Dyke and juniors Michelle Ho, Taryn West and Katie Yamamura.

Co-captain Lauren Eller, the only other Aggie senior, redshirted that season due to injury. Transfer Leah Housman, one of the four juniors, was still at Cal State Fullerton.

The rest of the Aggies are sophomores and freshmen, and with both captains ending fall quarter workouts with injuries, they will be pressed into action right away.

So how did that 2008 squad do with the youngsters playing major roles? UCD caught fire midway through the season, improving to a season-best 194.700 to capture the program’s first Mountain Pacific Sports Federation title. The Aggies won or shared individual event championships in all four events plus the all-around, and that score at the conference meet remains the school record.

Although Lavallee is too process-oriented to fixate on an actual numerical score, he would like to see this year’s team follow a similar path: the team goal is to capture a third straight MPSF championship (and the fourth in five years), and set its season-best score in that final meet. Incidentally, the 2008 conference meet was held at UCD’s own floor at The Pavilion, which will host the 2012 championship on March 24.

In each of the past two seasons, the Aggies have compiled the conference’s highest regional-qualifying score from start to finish, then delivered the winning score at the championship meet. Last year, UCD led the league with a 193.030 RQS before edging Air Force with a 192.975 team effort at the championships. Lavallee hopes for more of the same this year:

“Our goal is to maintain our position in the MPSF throughout the course of the season and at the championship meet,” said the three-time MPSF Coach of the Year. “We will have to do well in managing ourselves to get to the point where we win that meet.”

In achieving that objective, fall practice provided strong indications that the Aggies would enter the reason in good shape, literally.

“This group has certainly been at a higher conditioning level, doing a good job becoming stronger, faster and more powerful,” Lavallee said. “As I tell my team every year, their level of fitness on Jan. 1 is what dictates the whole season. Going for 12 weeks straight is very demanding. You have to prepare your body for what you’re asking it to do, and this has done a very good job preparing.”

However, while the Aggies may be physically ready for the season, Lavallee acknowledges that the biggest challenge for this season will be preparing his relatively young team for the mental rigors of collegiate gymnastics.

“When you’re in club and you go to the region championships, you turn around, raise your hand to the judges and think, ‘all I have to do is catch this Tkachev (a move on the uneven bars) and I’m going to nationals,’ ” Lavallee said. “In college, when you turn around to raise your hand, you see 17 other faces saying, ‘you need to catch this Tkachev.’

College has a whole different set of stressors, but eventually it becomes a very motivating stressor. For a lot of kids, it can take a while to figure out how to use it to perform at a higher level. But we tell the team that no individual will find success until the team finds success. That has been true since I started coaching and it was true before then.”

Fortunately for Lavallee, he has an excellent crew of veterans who help cultivate such an environment in the program. Although slowed by an ankle injury during the team’s December intrasquad meet, Van Dyke looks to finish her outstanding Aggie career.

The 2010 balance beam champion captured all-conference honors on both beam and floor last year, narrowly missing a berth as the individual beam qualifier to the NCAA Corvallis Regional. She amassed a season RQS of 9.735 on the event while scoring 9.800 or better on floor four times.

Yamamura has bounced back to the form that resulted in two 39-point all-around scores, earned four All-MPSF awards and qualified her to the NCAA regional in 2010. She showed a glimpse of it after her return from injury late last season, most notably with a school-record 9.900 on vault at the conference championship.

Ho enjoyed a breakout season as a sophomore in 2011, earning All-MPSF honors on both uneven bars and floor exercise. She led the conference on the latter event, compiling a 9.825 RQS and nearly qualifying for the NCAA region meet. However, she lost the tiebreaker to Sacramento State’s Kailey Hansen on the final day of the regular season.

Eller, West and Housman, along with sophomores Anna Shumaker and Madeline Kennedy, are also expected to be strong contributors.

Friday’s opener against Arizona State begins at 6 p.m. and UCD’s home opener is Sunday, Jan. 22, against Air Force.

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