Utes win their session and knock out UCLA
Maile O’Keefe is your NCAA beam and all around champion!
Finished in third place today. Still had a great season and still added to the Red Rocks legacy.
Proud of the team.
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Since I didn’t see it, what happened? Was there a fall or just not as clean as the day before?
Vault wasn’t clean.
Coaches think they were trying too hard to stick the vaults, which usually causes a gymnast to under rotate and land short. Injuries also cost Utah two of their top 6 vaulters unfortunately
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Yep. OU was lights out with a great score. OU was just a little better on each and with 0.05s and 0.1s here and there, adds up. Their average score for all events for all gymnasts was 9.92 (and they didn’t even have any 10s - only UF and Utah had one each). Florida did really well all around as well, amazing on last rotation on bars. Averaged 9.91. We were just below 9.90 average. We scored above 198 the 1st 3 rounds, but didn’t quite get there on the last day. 3rd for last 3 years.
Utah beam was the highest rotation score by any team (by a little), but vault was lowest rotation of any team (but a little bit more). High of 9.9 was Brenner (grad transfer from Mich, largely for vault). Low score counted was 9.7625 (O’Keefe IIRC, which is low for her, esp. after winning the all-around and 9.8625 on vault while doing that). Not going to win with 9.7s and need at least several 9.9s on pretty much every event to win.
If they had scored what they did on Thurs, it would have been 0.2 higher, but still not enough to win (and still would’ve been 0.1 short of UF). Thursday night’s score of 198.225 was just short of UF 198.2375 on Sat, so we needed even better than Thursday but didn’t quite have the numbers. Florida actually stepped up since they were in the 197s on Thursday. LSU wasn’t really in contention - the order of finish actually stayed the same through every rotation.
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I think the “gymternet” is going to do a re-score of the whole final with a former NCAA judge. It will be interesting because there were some obvious over-scores for OU. Trautman specifically on beam shouldn’t have been able to score above a 9.8 as she had an obvious wobble and another obvious wobble with a leg lift. (.1 to .3 deduction for each) yet she got a 9.825 (OU dropped this one but the whole rotation was over scored)
Still, we needed to do better on Vault and had a bad meet on that apparatus.
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We have a great class coming in and several stars that are coming back, so 
. Still awesome they are still making the championship every year (and final 4 last 3 years) but need a couple more tenths on vault and just a little more everywhere. I’m happy we are ‘beam U’, keeping the reputation for so long.
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Just getting Stanhope and Grace back on vault will make a difference.
The recruiting class will add more depth, and reality is the team loses very little.
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what bout rumors that Lucy and Jillian are entering the transfer portal?
Jillian was never coming back after this season
I haven’t seen any well sourced rumors about Lucy, but she would not break the team in any way. She’s a good gymnast, but talent wise the incoming class is equal or better.
Wow, such great information from all of you. Thanks so much. I know very little about gymnastics, but I guess I am not surprised that the team that wins has some high scores that could be questioned.
I’m a bit nervous about AI but I’m thinking one beneficial use of it would be to replace all the subjective scoring in gymnastics and ice skating.
Our Red Rocks didn’t have an ideal vault rotation but I think we did a bit better than the scores reflect.
That being said, another amazing year and the future looks bright for this amazing team.
Go Utes!
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The hard part about the vault for Utah was how we missed.
By trying to stick so hard they under-rotated and came up short, then took a step back. Under rotation is a separate deduction from the step, which led to the 9.7 range scores
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Yeah, on Thu when OU knew they were advancing, they seemed to play it safe on vault (last rotation) and I think all the girls took a step forward. So they took the 0.1 but made sure to not fall but also to complete rotations. So they got more 9.8 range scores.
I’m guessing Utah knew they had a good floor rotation to start and were pressing a little because they knew they needed a good vault to have a chance (bars and beam are strengths). Backfired. Like any sport, when you know the opponent has to make mistakes or you have to be perfect to win, sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s like live by the 3, die by the 3 in some underdog basketball games.
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Lucy officially in the portal
Thus is pure speculation, but it’s unlikely she would see any action outside of vault at Utah, so if she wants to do more, transferring is her best option.
Utahs last two classes are super impressive
Yeah. Both she and Jillian were going to see diminished roles next year. Generally, Lucy tended to be the weakest link in her rotations
What in the world is going on on reddit–friends of Sage T., Jillian and Lucy trashing Fardon and the program???
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It’s the “Gymternet”. It’s a ridiculous group of people
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