UCLA’s Vanessa Zamarripa qualified for the U.S. National Team.
But Marcus in the comments informs that she’s decided not to try for World’s 2010, instead focusing on the NCAA. I see that confirmed on College Gymnastics Board.
I’d have loved to have seen that Cheng vault (VIDEO) on the international stage.
This is the same decision faced by Canada’s Kristina Vaculik. So far Kristina’s on the Canadian list for World’s. I assume that means she won’t be reporting at Stanford until January.
Who else is deferring until January? Or later? … Mattie Larson, …
36 comments ↓
Why bother going for the National Team if you are not going to compete for them…? Takes a spot away from another girl.
Somebody said she reported that the elite scene is too “stuffy”. It may be a case of getting partway involved and re-thinking things and wanting to follow through on competing at Nationals because that was her goal. Then she may have decided the politics were too stressful. I can’t read minds though so let’s ask VanZam ourselves
We could have used that vault. This is BS.
Next year, she may not merit a slot. May be other Amanars on the scene. This is stupid.
That’s not the reason she isn’t vying for Worlds this year.
Coach Val discussed the decision and the conversation she had with Marta in this press conference video.
http://www.uclabruins.com/allaccess/?media=186378
Thanks Rodney.
“Takes a spot away from another girl.”
No it doesn’t. Marta can put anyone on the team she wants.
That link isn’t working. Got another?
I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. The whole thing is stupid. I don’t know if it is Miss Val putting the Uni team first, or Zam not having the stones to go through with things. But we could have used those POINTS. Grrr…this blows. Look at all the Okie gymnasts on the men’s side. Women’s gym needs to figure out how to be part of the national program. They can still wear tattoos and bounce around like cheerleaders. (I mean heck, the men have ALWAYS been loud and cheered each other as a team). Just change the rules to make the codes the same and all will be well…
I want the points. I want the points. I want the points. Get that girl back in the gym. If she hits the Cheng even 50% of the time(!), she is a mathematical benefit to the world team and deserves selection. And you can’t tell me based on that one miss, that she can’t train up to hit that thing 8 of 10.
GRRR! GRRR!!
I don’t understand how it is “uncharted territory?” I thought Mohini did it, but maybe I’m remembering incorrectly.
View the interview with Val Kondos.
She indicated that Marta pretty much told her that Zam’s Cheng isn’t consistent enough for Zam to have much of a chance at being placed on the team. Zam’s other routines on the other events are not up to elite difficulty – yet.
The WAG NCAA will never look like the MAG version. Why would they want to?
The males compete under what is essentially the FIG code, , the males physically peak later, and the men’s NCAA has been so decimated that it does not have to consider (as much) the wide range of abilities that need to be accommodated to allow large numbers of gymnasts to compete.
i agree with polyistcoandbanned on this completely. this sucks. she should be encouraged to make that vault more consistent instead of discouraged. this does not make me a fan of marta and the current system. let’s open this sport up to competition and encourage athletes with potential instead of discouraging them and crushing dreams. boo his boooooo
As far as elite goes, I thought her goal was to get on the 2012 Olympic team. I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew that three weak events and a Cheng weren’t going to get her on the 2010 World team but went for it anyway – for the experience. I wouldn’t assume her dream has been crushed. Maybe things are going exactly according to her plan.
I did the frikking math. Even just averaging the two scores she got for the Chengs, her demonstrated performance, that is enough to justify putting her on the team. If you just run the numbers from nationals and come up with the best 3 up team, she belongs there.
this blows. I think Zam wimped out or something. Of course Marta can’t promise her a spot. But she has a very strong possibility of helping the team. Really more likely than Sloan getting healthy, Raisman learning an Amanar, or Caquetto getting consistent.
Sigh, sigh, sigh.
And it would have been a great wedge for my sneaky plan to transform wimmin’s gym. the men resisted for a while and then changed and all was fine. women can change scoreing and still keep all the bells and whistles. so what if they aren’t competitive with Chinese 12 year olds. They can still compete amongst each other with a code that allows different gymnastics and rewards it.
and once we have transformed women’s gym, we will crush the world. Sure, not every co-ed can compete with He Kexin. But there will, out of that huge pool, be a few who end up helping. I’m sure of it! and they won’t be in this grrfrikkinggrrr conundrum of the types of training hurting each other instead of helping each other.
Good call, Sher.
Lose the battle. Win the war. Bars is her ticket, not Vault.
I agree with Sher.
My impression from the Kondos interview was that Marta strongly hinted that Zam would not make the team.
Seriously, that plan to transform “wimmins gym”
into some version of the men’s NCAA will never happen.
Get real. The men’s NCAA is dying as we speak. There is no reason the females would ever wish to follow in those footsteps. The risks far outweigh the benefits, and the ladies are putting on a show a lot of people want to see. The men aren’t. End of story. It’s the free market in action. This will not change for a few girls who want to go elite.
The US already has one of the top women’s teams in the world under the current system. They have almost no worries that they will not be on the podium in Rotterdam. The men are not quite in that situation.
Sacramone competed elite and NCAA at the same time. People seem to have forgotten that. It just wasn’t at a high profile school like UCLA.
Sacramone failed big time at elite and college. She was horrible at Browns.
Zam should not be on a team for one vault and making said vault 50% of the time is inconsistent. I saw her miss several in training. In fact she only hit one out of 4.
I can’t believe people wanted her on this for one vaukt when she has no other use. You know how Marta kills her gymnasts.
Poly, I’ve told you this a thousand times, and you still don’t seem to understand it, so I’ll try again. I’m beginning to think you’ve never met an average college gymnast.
If you opened NCAA to FIG scoring, then you’d get the absolute upper end of the girls, who comprise about 10 of the total girls in NCAA gymnastics, able to do sky-high valued routines, and everyone else just scraping to get by (as they already are maxed out with difficulty. You think there are girls sitting on hoards of skills they’re not doing for some reason? They aren’t.). The separation between the only 4 schools who have ever won NCAA championships and the rest of the entire collegiate system would only increase, thereby making women’s gymnastics exactly LESS competitive and exactly LESS interesting to fans and only HURT the sport. While it may be exciting to watch one school, in the long run, it will detract from everyone else and likely deter future athletes from pursuing collegiate gymnastics because they’ll know they don’t have a shot at doing anything with the sport, schools will become disinterested in maintaining the sport, and then we won’t have anything. Why did the men open it up? Because god, ********, they don’t have any schools left anyway, so who cares what they do at this point. Might as well format the system so the individual athlete can have some break-out success because there’s sure as hell no concern left for the team aspect of men’s gym. But there are enough schools left in women’s gym so why make a move that would handicap 99% of them and make the field LESS competitive?
It’d be pretty much the stupidest thing NCAA could do for the sport. Why you are so fixated on it, I have no idea. You keep saying things like “bells and whistles” and “tattoos and cheering” like that’s really what anybody cares about. Nobody cares about that stuff, nobody’s concerned with it. That’s just a side effect of the team format.
As far as helping, they’re not prohibited from helping now. But stop to look at the two fields: NCAA competes in the late winter/spring, and then the elite system competes over the summer and into the fall. How many athletes do you know who want to subject themselves to year-round competition? There are training cycles for a reason, and asking a girl to be in competition mode for her school and then her country with few breaks in between would possibly injure her or detract from her gymnastics during one of the two seasons.
Bottom line for you Poly? Shut up about NCAA. If you want to fix it, fine, it needs something, but you’re going to need a new, not stupid idea. Because the one you keep singing is just flat out wrong.
You have one good point Nooo.
… But saying Alicia failed big time at elite?
That undermines your valid point about Zam’s vault.
Poly is never going to read that long piece of know it all attitude. She is allowed her opinion so you shut up.
I didn’t say she failed big time at elite. I said she filed big time doing both seeing she did nothing for brown
This is what I said and I made the AND ALL CAPITAL
Sacramone failed big time at elite AND college
Ah, that makes more sense, Nooo.
“I didn’t say she failed big time at elite. I said she filed big time doing both seeing she did nothing for brown”
She was just coming back from major knee surgery during her first season at Brown. By the end of the season, she qualified herself to nationals and only missed the FX EF from stepping OOB.
TCO is entitled to his own opinion, but he’s not entitled to his own facts.
Fixated on big skills and watching athletes fight for spots on world and Olympic teams?
Than by all means, support the guys.
I’ll make it easy for you – surely you can come up with some loose change – just send it here
http://www.calgymnasticsforever.com/
Dude, you admitted you didn’t even bother to attend the men’s meets near you – and those were FREE.
the beauty is that NCAA and elite are 2 completely different worlds- a gymnast can choose to succeed in one or both worlds. What would have become of some of the NCAA “Stars” (Susan Jackson, etc) if they only had the elite world to work with? Making them the same would severely decrease the number of teams and athletes. At this point, a top NCAA meet brings in more fans than US Nationals and keeps their athletes in better shape for a longer period of time, so if anything, USAG should take a few notes from NCAA.
The attendance for the women’s finals in Hartford was around 11,000. The Utes and some of the ladies of the SEC can do far better than that.
TCOs Okie heros will never, ever come close.
I watched Alicia compete at Brown. She was head and shoulders above the competition in terms of skills and (for the most part) artistry, but keep in mind that Brown is a team that can barely manage 186 and change on a good day, and the competition isn’t particularly stiff. What ASac lacked as an NCAA athlete was clean landings – the same things she lacks as an elite, where it is relatively less penalized under the new code. I don’t think she’ll ever be a great NCAA gymnast, and I think she’s ok with that – it’s fantastic to see her leg-power back on the elite scene.
The best part of seeing her as a college gymnast was, of course, watching her outscore everyone in the gym on bars (competing for Brown, if you can manage a release move, you’re up). Her gienger used to bring down the house. Oh, the irony.
It cracks me up every time one of the US commentators gets all melodramatic before one of Alicia’s DTYs, intoning “But can she STICK it?” I don’t think I’ve ever seen that girl stick a vault, and I’m not holding my breath.
Just a clarification: I meant to say that slightly messy/bouncy landings are less penalized under the non-10 elite scoring system than in the NCAA scoring system, not that they’re less penalized under the new code for this quad than they were last quad. Obviously expectations for floor landings, at least, have gotten a lot more rigorous.
Stepping out is part of the sport. It’s a fact she did nothiung for Brown.
Why do so many people make excuses for everything Alicia does?
Treat Shawn like crap cuz she beats her NOOO problem she was just upset. Refuse to show up for all the practices at Brown and get special treatment NO PROBLEM. Enough already.
The fanatics always make excuses for their crushes. Nastia’s fans are worse.
Alicia did not compete the difficulty in College. sHE STARTED HER FLOOR MOST NIGHTS WITH A DOUBLE PIKE THAT IS WHEN SHE COMPTED
Alicia did nothing for Brown except contribute big scores to the team total. Don’t know what a gymnast is supposed to do besides that.
A lot of gymnasts don’t compete full difficulty in college. Did you see Zamarippa’s Cheng in College?
Sher is correct. This also applies to the men. And they have the open ended system.
No one saw Steve Legendre’s Dragulescu or his Ri Jong Song during the NCAA season. Ditto Ruggeri’s 6.8 vault.
They might do these next year, if they feel the benefit outweighs the risk…
I still don’t get what the plan is. If she spends the next year, doing NCAA routines and concentrating on that, this will lead her AWAY from the difficulty adding she could be doing if she went after the world team.
If she sits OUT the competition season, then why not go for the World team? The experience will be beneficial even if she doesn’t make it.
The whole thing makes no sense and I suspect she and/or Miss Val are prioritizing NCAA competition over elite. That basically she is fizzling out on her attempt to do elite. Either by choice or because of the inherent conflict in the very different rules.
At least man up and admit it, if this is the case.
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