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."