The school from Athens brought multiple Olympians to the NCAA Gymnastics Northeast Regionals , and for one day, Penn's Marissa Rosen got to be their teammate.
Rosen was paired with the No. 1-seeded Georgia team, whose Courtney Kupets and Courtney McCool were both part of the silver-medal-winning U.S. gymnastics team at the 2004 Olympics.
Top-seeded Rosen placed 13th overall in the all-around, with a score of 37.925, at a highly-competitive meet in which Georgia, the defending national champion, won. The Bulldogs' Tiffany Tolnay probably had the performance of a lifetime, not scoring below 9.900 in any of her four events and winning the all-around title.
"It was fun but I didn't do as well as I was hoping to do," Rosen said. "I was the only one from my team and I was competing with Olympians and high-level gymnasts . it's hard to match their performance."
Rosen's first event of the day was on the uneven parallel bars, where she scored a 9.500. However, that score was good for just 39th in an event where Georgia's Katie Heenan took first place with a near-perfect score of 9.950. The Bulldogs took the first four spots on the bars.
"Georgia just put on a great exhibition. Their gymnastics was really good," Penn coach John Ceralde said. "For Marissa to have to follow that whole team, she did a great job."
On the beam, Rosen came in second to last with a score of 8.950 after falling off at the beginning of her routine. After the fall, Ceralde said "she had a strong second half," but she could not recover. Rosen has done much better on the beam; she scored a 9.725 at the 2008 Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference Championships.
Rosen bounced back from a difficult beam to score a 9.725 in the floor, normally her strongest event, to tie for 25th with three other girls.
She saved her best for last, though, tying for 14th on the vault with a 9.750, her highest score of the day. But it did not come easy for Rosen, who was having difficulty with her vault in the warm up rounds.
"My run was off and my steps were off so I kept starting at a different place," she said. "It was kind of scary because I didn't know where to start so I just went for it. I got lucky and I nailed it."
Despite performing better at last year's Regionals - she finished 10th, when she was also ranked No. 1 - Rosen claimed to be more pleased with this year's results and her season overall.
Ceralde too, said that he couldn't be happier with what Rosen has done, despite the second-straight disappointing Regionals results.
"She's had a great season, and you know, being a sophomore, to make it to the NCAA Regionals two years in a row as the top seed is a big accomplishment," he said.
