Higher and higher
In a sport that figures scores to three decimal places, the University Titans improved by whole numbers – and that improvement added up to a win over Greater Spokane League high school gymnastics power Mead in a Jan. 11 showdown.
On their home floor, University scored 166.5 points to Mead’s 164.325 – the highest team score for both this season.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how great that felt,” senior co-captain Tatiana Garcia said. “We don’t keep score during a meet so we didn’t know where things stood until they announced it at the end of the meet.
“Beating Mead is something no one has done in a league meet since I’ve been here – four years.”
The Titans have beaten Mead before.
“We’ve beaten them to win districts,” University coach Tracy Duncan said. “No one has beaten them in a league meet for more than four years.”
Two gymnasts had career-high nights against the Panthers: freshman Kayleigh Campbell and senior co-captain Taylor Vold.
Campbell, who was not part of the Titans varsity in the team’s first meet, a nonleague win over North Central, scored 34.4 points, more than three full points more than her previous personal best, to win the all-around title against the Panthers.
“Kayleigh’s previous high score all-around was 31.075 points against Ferris and Rogers,” Duncan said. “She improved on that by 3.325 points. That’s a huge jump.”
Vold turned in a career best 9.5 to win the floor exercise, leading four Titans to score more than nine out of 10 points in that event. Garcia was right on her heels with a 9.425.
“When they turned over their scorecards and it said 9.5 it was the most incredible feeling,” Vold said. “I can’t describe it. Now the pressure is on to go out there and do it again.”
Freshmen Stacie Davis and Campbell scored 9.325 and 9.125, respectively. Junior Denel Lang scored an 8.6 and included, for the first time, an advanced tumbling run.
“We’ve been working on having her add salkows to her tumbling run,” Duncan said. “She had them in her routine for the first time against Mead. Once she gets a little more confidence in them, she could easily jump up into the 9.0 range because they have a much higher degree of difficulty.”
Over the past few seasons, the floor exercise has become University’s signature event.
“(Co-head coach) Karen (Renner) sat down and figured it out,” Duncan said. “We’ve never been beaten on the floor exercise. And with scores like these, we won’t be beaten.”
Duncan credits the emergence of the two freshmen, in large part, to the leadership of Garcia and Vold. The co-coaches charged their seniors to help prepare the freshmen for the upcoming season.
“We haven’t really worked on specific routines with them, but we do help get them ready for the season,” Vold said. “We want to make sure they’re relaxed and ready to compete. We don’t want them to get too nervous. Mostly we just try to make sure they laugh and have fun.”
“We make sure we have people stationed all around the floor when we compete,” Garcia said. “We do it for everyone, but especially for the freshmen. We want to make sure they always see someone there smiling and rooting for them on every tumbling run.”
The Titans were at Lewis and Clark for a league meet Wednesday, but their floor exercise scores were designed to be considerably lower than at Mead. LC uses a wrestling mat instead of a spring floor for the floor exercise and Duncan and Renner were determined to limit the team’s potential for injury on the much harder and less forgiving surface.
“We take everything out when we compete on a wrestling mat,” Duncan said. “We just don’t let them take the chance of getting hurt. We take out the difficult tumbling runs. We don’t even let them warm-up on a wrestling mat. They get one tumbling run to warm up and one tumbling run in their routine and that’s it.
“For the LC meet we’re going to take some of our varsity kids out of a few events and let some of the other kids get some experience. It’s a meet where we don’t need everyone competing in every event.”
U-Hi goes into next week’s GSL meet looking to clinch a league title. A win over North Central wraps up an undefeated league season and the title.
Beyond that comes the district meet Feb. 1 at Central Valley and the Eastern Regional meet Feb. 9 on the Titans home floor, with the state championships the following week at the Tacoma Dome.
“You know Mead is going to be primed to come back and win the rematch,” Duncan said. “We could easily be in a battle with them two straight weeks, at the district and again at the regional, and the regional meet is the one that counts because only one team goes to state.”
Of all the upcoming meets, the most stressful will be the regional.
“There is so much pressure on you in the regional,” Vold said. “Every event is critical, and every mistake is magnified. You want to make sure you don’t let your teammates down.”
Both Vold and Garcia said they will make every effort to help prepare the freshmen to meet the postseason challenge.
“The one thing you don’t want to do is to leave a teammate home from the state meet,” Garcia said. “That’s the worst feeling in the world, leaving someone behind. We want to make sure everyone gets to go.”