UCLA gymnasts to focus on clean dismounts in triple meet against Denver and Minnesota
Brittani McCullough will look to land cleanly on Sunday after past miscues.
Gymnastics
Denver,
Minnesota
Sunday, 2 p.m.
Pauley Pavilion
Watch a live stream of the meet on UCLABruins.com
No. 9 UCLA will look to stick the landing and go 24 for 24 in a tri-meet against two top-25 teams.
By Mansi Sheth
Feb. 25, 2011 7:20 a.m.
Stick the landing.
The phrase is an oft-used one in gymnastics to describe that crucial moment when an airborne gymnast lands effortlessly on both feet and refuses to move. When achieved, it never fails to draw cries of approval from fans.
Come Sunday, the UCLA gymnastics team hopes to keep the crowd at Pauley Pavilion cheering for the entire meet by sticking the majority of its landings on every rotation.
“These past couple weeks, we have been working hard on landing,” freshman Sydney Sawa said. “Our routines have been good so far, but we haven’t been able to really stick them.”
After scoring a season-high 197.475 in Monday’s meet against No. 25 North Carolina State, the No. 9 Bruins (7-6) hope to follow up with a pair of victories against No. 12 Denver and No. 21 Minnesota on Sunday. If the Bruins indeed emerge victorious, it will be their first set of consecutive wins this season.
“(Denver and Minnesota) are two good teams and they both will be very clean,” coach Valorie Kondos Field said. “If we hit, we should win, but we can’t take anything for granted. We cannot make mistakes and expect to win because there is too much depth in the country.”
Minimizing costly mistakes against the Pioneers and Gophers will be key for the Bruins, who have hit 24 for 24 routines only once this year.
Among the Bruins hoping to avoid unnecessary errors is redshirt senior Brittani McCullough, who has been penalized for stepping out of bounds on floor exercises in the past two meets.
“Every time it has been something a little bit different,” McCullough said. “It hasn’t really been anything big ““ just fixing small details. I have to make sure that I know exactly where I am so that I can land right.”
Although she struggled on floor for the two previous competitions, McCullough was near perfect on the balance beam Monday, leading the Bruins to a season-high 49.40. The team has dramatically improved on its shaky starts on the apparatus, thanks in part to a solidified lineup that has remained fairly consistent for the past month.
The current lineup is still far from being finalized for the postseason. In addition to the six gymnasts who usually compete on balance beam, Kondos Field said that there are four more Bruins who are equally capable of performing well.
The fast-paced format of Sunday’s tri-meet presents an ideal opportunity for Kondos Field to test the competitive readiness of her gymnasts by allowing her to add two exhibition routines to every event instead of just one.
The top six competitors on every rotation besides the balance beam are well-established, and expectations of high scores have been set for Sunday.
“At the beginning of the season, they would be able to make corrections in the gym, but they would just go hard during competition,” Kondos Field said of the gymnasts. “They are finally transferring their technique for their skills to the meet.”
