The gymnastics team held its first home meet of the season Sunday, hosting No. 2 Georgia, Iowa and No. 24 Ohio State. The team finished with a score of 194.625, setting a home opener school record but finishing second to Georgia who won the match with the score of 197.250.
Coach Mark Stevenson said his team performed well, and that he was impressed by the team’s overall score.
“I thought we had a really good meet. We improved two and a half points from last week, which is getting some meets under our belt and makes us more comfortable out there and makes it easier for us under those circumstances,” Stevenson said. “For this time of the year, if you look at our scores in the past years, we’ve never been at that level this early in the season. That’s usually a February, March type thing”.
Despite the second-place finish overall, Stevenson said hitting the routine is more important than beating somebody.
“We don’t worry too much about beating somebody,” Stevenson said. “Our job is to hit our routines. We don’t talk about winning or losing so much. We talk about staying within yourself, and be successful with hitting your routine. If you hit your routine and your teammates hits their routine, we’re going to have a good score.”
Junior Leigha Hancock tied for second with three other girls in the vault event and freshman Taylor Seaman was third in the uneven parallel bars.
Stevenson spoke about some of the strengths of Hancock and Seaman.
“Taylor is really a bouncy, dynamic freshman who is going to do nothing but get better for us. She had a fault on a beam, so she would have been up there for the all-round position,” he said. “Leigha went to NCAAs last year. She was our first athlete to ever win a regional championship. She won floor last year at the regionals meet with kids from Georgia in that competition.”
Seaman said the floor routine was her best event of the meet.
“My best event today was probably the floor just because I hit my routine the way that I wanted to do it,” Seaman said.
State’s next meet is Friday at Rutgers. The next home meet is the Governor’s Cup on Feb. 2 against North Carolina, Maryland and Towson at 7 p.m.