Perfect landing

Monday, 4/21/97 Perfect landing Bruins finish unevenly in
individual event finals after winning team title

By Mark Dittmer Daily Bruin Senior Staff The NCAA gymnastics
championships began Thursday with the team preliminaries, in which
the 12 finalists are paired down to six. On Friday, five more teams
see their seasons’ end, possibly with hopes and expectations
unfulfilled, while one team is crowned the national champion.
"There’s nothing more to ask for," UCLA senior Amy Smith said on
Saturday after her team had won the national championship. "Nothing
could top last night." So then, in a perplexing arrangement on
Saturday, the gymnasts took the floor, bars, beam and the vault
again for the anticlimactic individual event finals. Smith herself
competed in the vault and on the floor on Saturday, finishing 10th
and eighth, respectively. "For me, it was a little odd," she said.
Leah Homma, Lena Degteva and Stella Umeh were the other three UCLA
gymnasts to compete in the individual event finals on Saturday.
Homma competed on the balance beam and uneven bars, finishing fifth
and 13th, respectively. Degteva finished fifth on vault and Umeh
finished 11th on bars. To decide which gymnasts competed on
Saturday was determined in the team preliminaries on Thursday. The
top four performers on each apparatus from each of the two Thursday
sessions move on to the finals on Saturday so that each event has
eight finalists. However, there are often fourth-place ties, so
more than four athletes from each session end up competing
Saturday. Two Georgia gymnasts took away individual event titles.
Leah Brown won the floor exercises with a 9.950, while Jenni
Beathard took the bars with an identical score. Meanwhile, Susan
Hines of Florida won the vault with a 9.8875, and Summer Reid and
Elizabeth Reid (no relation) tied for the beam title, both
finishing with a 9.900 score. UCLA, on the other hand, merely
settled for the team national championship. "I’m a little
disappointed," Homma said on Saturday. "I could have done a little
better. But this (winning the team championship) has been the best
feeling of my entire career – so many emotions, happy and sad."
With reports from Lisa Quon, Daily Bruin Contributor.