Beam trouble dooms Gymnastics at GW

After an impressive opening meet victory over Cornell, the Penn gymnastics team hoped to achieve similar success at Saturday's George Washington Invitational. Instead, the Quakers suffered a disappointing last-place finish after a performance marred by falls and injuries. Penn scored 183.300 points, three less than in last Saturday's Cornell meet and 6 1/2 points behind first-place Maryland. North Carolina finished just behind the Terrapins, followed by William and Mary, George Washington, Temple and the Quakers. Last year, Penn finished second out of four teams in the invitational, in front of William and Mary and Temple while trailing only George Washington. That raised expectations for this year and added to the disappointment about this year's finish. "I'd call this a wake-up call for us," Penn coach Tom Kovic said. "It's hard to have consistently high expectations without having any flawed events, though." The Quakers had a nightmarish beginning and were never able to gain any kind of rhythm. The first event of the day was the balance beam, which is normally a very strong event for Penn. On Saturday, however, there were four falls on the beam as the Quakers had difficulty controlling their nerves in their first loud and very competitive setting of the year. "We didn't have an awesome warm-up, which probably started some jitters," sophomore Jenn Capasso said. "I think we were all looking around at everyone else a lot more than we should have been. It's tough to start with that event." After the four falls on the beam, the Quakers never seemed to be able to gain their composure. The next event was the floor competition and only Capasso, with a 9.425, was able to score well. Penn, which usually tallies in the 47 to 48 point range for the floor, only scored 44.950, a number which was partly due to a devastating injury to junior Lizzie Jacobson. Jacobson, who had just come back from preseason wrist surgery, tore her ACL and will be out for the year. According to Kovic, the injury meant not just a loss of points but a loss of team morale, which was already down. "It was a struggle just to finish the meet and I personally didn't have my head into it," junior Kirby Thorpe said. "It was crushing to see so many people fall in the first event and that made us know that the rest of the meet was going to be tough." Penn's struggles continued on the uneven bars, with the team scoring a total of 45.325 points. The best event for the Quakers was the vault, in which five out of six gymnasts scored at least nine points for their performances. The top all-around performer for the Quakers was senior Molly Sullivan, who scored a combined 36.575 for the four events. The other Quakers who competed in all four events were sophomore Sarah Bruscia and freshman Sarah Tudryn. Kovic plans to change his training strategies for individual gymnasts. He believes that this will help his team go through the season as healthily and successfully as possible. Kovic was able to find a similarity between last weekend and an important stage of last year's ECAC championship season. "This was kind of like when we lost the Yale meet last year," Kovic said. "It ended up being the turning point of the season for us." The Quakers naturally hope that Saturday's struggles will yield similarly positive results for the rest of the season. For now, Penn just hopes to be physically and mentally ready for this weekend's meet against those same Elis from Yale.