Fatigue puts damper on w. gym wins
Bruins sweep Broncos despite wear of back-to-back marathon
meets
By Esther Hui
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
It was an exhausted group of Bruin athletes who marched out onto
the floor of the Wooden center Saturday night as the UCLA women’s
gymnastics team hosted Boise State.
After winning a meet in Berkeley against California, Stanford
and Denver in disappointing fashion Friday night a disappointing
performance Friday night (189.125), the Bruins needed a solid
performance to show that their early season domination was not just
an early season peak.
The Bruins answered the challenge with a three-point improvement
in the team score to beat the Broncos (192.050-181.850), and a
Bruin hat trick in the all-around by Leah Homma, Kareema Marrow,
and Stella Umeh. But with several major wobbles and four out of six
gymnasts tumbling off the beam, the Bruins lacked the consistency
and polish that the home crowd had come to expect.
"I hate to say it because it’ll sound like an excuse, but they
were tired," UCLA head coach Valerie Kondos said. "The mistakes
that they made were really inexcusable. Every single one of them
was just a simple lack of concentration. When you get tired your
body focuses on the hard tricks and you think the easy ones will
just come, but you can’t do that."
The Bruins’ best event of the evening was the uneven bars, in
which the last four gymnasts scored 9.875 or higher to take the top
four places. Marrow finished her routine with two crisp giant
swings to a stuck double layout dismount for a 9.925, the meet’s
highest bars score. One of the highlights was Megan Fenton, who has
built a name on this event after scoring a 10.0 two years ago.
Fenton performed two full-turn pirouettes on back giant swings and
then swung into a reverse hecht, finishing the routine with a
slight step off of a double tuck dismount for a resounding 9.9.
Beam was UCLA’s undoing. UCLA counted a good routine by Dee
Fischer which included a back handspring layout with a two foot
landing, and a roundoff full twist dismount for a 9.50, and a stuck
routine by Homma with a two handspring layout step out combination
for a 9.7. Those were the only hit routines on the beam in the
Bruins’ inconsistent showing.
"I’ve never had a team have such poor statistics on beam,"
Kondos said. "But I’ve never had a team compete as aggressively
either. I’m hoping that they’ll keep up this pace of going hard on
the event, and that they will start making their percentages get
better."