The moment then-freshman Danusia Francis made history as the first to attempt and land a unique side aerial on the beam in last year’s NCAA individual finals, UCLA gymnastics’ future on beam looked bright.
It seemed even brighter when, in the team’s first meet this year, redshirt junior Samantha Peszek returned from an Achilles injury to post the highest beam score of the day – a score that still keeps her tied for No. 1 nationally for that event.
The true sign of future success for the Bruins’ 2014 season on beam, however, was Francis incorporating her NCAA-first side aerial into her beam dismount in the first meet of the season. With each successive week of the competition, the sophomore has improved her score by a quarter of a tenth of a point per meet and is currently tied with Peszek for first nationally on beam – largely thanks to that dismount.
Yet despite the potential for last season’s worst event to become one of this year’s best, beam continues to be the thorn in the Bruins’ paw, something UCLA hopes to address on Friday when it competes against No. 22 California in Berkeley.
Falls and a flare-up of Peszek’s injury have resulted in UCLA failing to post a beam score higher than 48.825 in the season’s first three meets and its average beam score of 48.617 is over half a point below what the team managed during NCAA finals (49.175). Meanwhile, the team’s scores on vault, bars and floor have each averaged 49.000 or higher and, of the nine total scores from the other three events, only once has an event totaled below 49.000.
Using the same logic that has an inaccurate free-throw shooter take nothing but shots from the line for an entire practice, coach Valorie Kondos Field simply had her athletes spend so much time on beam that they “get sick of being up there.”
“(In practice,) we’ve been going for an approach where the longer you stay on a beam, the more comfortable you’ll feel up there,” Francis said. “So we’ve been doing double routines where you just don’t get off (the beam).”
But unlike a basketball player who misses its uncontested shots, Kondos Field said her athletes’ problems stem from concerns over letting the rest of the team down, not from poor technique.
“The struggles have been ‘stop trying so hard,’” Kondos Field said. “They’re trying not to fall off and to not let their teammates down, so they play tight. When they play tight, they make mistakes.”
And with the Golden Bears (3-4) having recently surged into the top 25, No. 9 UCLA (1-2) will need to be fairly mistake-free to come away with a victory – not that the team pays much attention to its opponent anyway.
“We don’t really think about who our opponent is because it’s a sport where you can’t affect their performance,” Francis said. “We just go in and stay in our own little bubble and do our thing.”
Staying in the bubble is especially important for redshirt sophomore Ellette Craddock,a Bay Area native who led off on beam last week due to lineup changes aimed at establishing stability on the event.
“We’re competing against ourselves, ultimately,” she said. “We’re looking at the long run, just to get to nationals and win a national championship, and we take it one meet at a time to get to that point.”