Author: Rick Mc

UCLA 197.725
Oklahoma 197.250
Alabama 197.225
Stanford 197.100
Florida 197.000
Utah 196.225

Carly Janiga should have gotten 10 on Bars. Judges only go 9.95 … That might pull Stanford ahead of Florida for Team. IT DOES … Stanford 197.1 … CONGRATS !! … What an amazing weekend.

Niki Tom (UCLA) poor landing out of double pike. They’ll want to drop that score, 9.725.

Oklahoma finishes 197.25 … Florida finishes 197.00 … I think Alabama (Beam) vs UCLA (Floor) will be fighting it out to be CHAMPS. But Stanford is still close … they need the best Bar routines of their season to challenge.

Wonderful Beam for Oklahoma. Team score 49.20 … but not as high as UCLA, as I recall.

Florida is finished the meet. Final team score … 197.00 … not enough to win, we project.

Great Bars Alabama. Team 49.25.

Best Bar routine of the day … Kayla Hoffman (Alabama). Giver her a 10. … She got 9.925.

Florida goes 49.425 on Floor! … Can UCLA beat that?

Simultaneous brilliant routines from Ashanee 9.95 (Floor) and Vanessa 9.90 (Beam). … UCLA rocked beam. Normally that would win it for them. But OK, Florida and Alabama won’t go away. It’s going to be close. … For that matter, Stanford won’t go away. They had great vault again today.

Brie Olson (Oklahoma) super 1/1 twisting double layout from Bars. … Hollie Vise super clean 9.90. I suspected OK might fall behind the lead on Bars. I’m wrong. Team score 49.35.

Castillo doing floor in lieu of Stageburg for Florida.

4th rotation of six. This may decide it. If UCLA HITS Beam, I think they’ll win. Oklahoma is on Bars. Florida on Floor. Stanford on Vault.

Utah counts a fall on beam. Both Bijak and Deetscreek fell. They will almost certainly finish in 6th as a team now.

Anna Li steps on landing. Only 9.90. … She and Vanessa have the prettiest routines in the meet. UCLA goes 49.35 on their weakest apparatus. Likely beam will decide the team Champion … between Oklahoma and UCLA. … Alabama not looking as good to me as in prelims, but their scores are still good. It helps to have Morgan Dennis killing every routine.

Lovely Vanessa Zamarripa nails Bars. Fantastic. … Only 9.90, judges?

I’d say UCLA and Oklahoma are “winning”, so far. We are 1/3 of the way through the meet.

Florida dodges another bullet. This time on Beam. 49.20 team.

Marissa King (Florida) fell on Bars. And then on Beam. Too bad.

Utah far cleaner on Bars than day 1. Still, they have inferior line, form, difficulty … everything, than the rest of the Super 6. LOVE Daria Bijak’s Bars, though. Talk about dynamic. STUCK double front. Danke! … they finish 49.30. Impressive, since judging on Bars more realistic today than in prelims. Good job, Utah.

Teams are tearing it up in the second rotation. What a GREAT meet!

Stanford’s first gymnast on Beam falls. Alyssa Brown. … But Stanford LOVES Beam. They still post a 49.10 team, not bad at all for that apparatus. Team rank on Beam will correlate closely with overall team rank.

UCLA rocks Vault for 49.475. … I’d say they’re “leading” already. … Or are they? Oklahoma goes 49.425 on Floor? It may take a HIGH number to win this meet.

Oklahoma having fun on Floor. Hollie Vise goes 9.925.

Miranda Smith (Florida) hits her foot on Tkachev … but saves the routine 9.70. Florida dodges a bullet on Bars. 49.125 They won’t have to count a routine with a fall.

Huge vault for McCullough (UCLA) 9.95

Bad. Marissa King (Florida) misses Bars badly. They can make no more mistakes on this apparatus.

Redemption. Ashanee Dickerson nails her Bars for host Florida. Sweet.

Oklahoma fans going nuts Their team starts on Floor.

Like yesterday, Florida starts on Bars. Ashanee Dickerson will NOT miss her release this time. She’s up first.

Click PLAY to find out. Or watch their oddball 2010 intro video on YouTube.

By far the best Bars warm-up of the 6 teams, I thought. And on each apparatus they were “precise”. A lot of attention to detail. More time spent on stuck landings.

… Lets see if that translates to success in the meet. Sometimes it’s a bad omen to “win warm-ups”.

All 6 teams look BETTER to me today than in prelims.

May the best team win.

After Senior qualifications the 8 teams advancing to finals …

1. France 263,850. 2. Germany 263,300. 3. Great Britain 262,025. 4. Spain 260,475. 5. Romania 257,550. 6. Italy 255,150. 7. Switzerland 254,925. 8. Greece 250,825.

via The All Around Gymnastics News on Facebook

We miss Russia.

This doesn’t look good. Who’s #171 ??

via British Gymnastics Photos – Senior Men’s Qualifications on Facebook

Super 6 warm-ups have just begun.

Florida is the loudest team. (Ashanee just caught her first Bars release, the one she missed in competition yesterday. And caught her second, convincingly. That thing is HIGH.)

I’d better watch Beam more closely today.

Elzer on College Gymnastics Board:

During both semifinals, the deciding factor between the teams that advanced and those that did not was performance on the balance beam.

With the exception of UCLA, all the six finalists had at least one really bad event. If one ranks all twelve teams by apparatus, Alabama was 10th on floor, Florida was 11th on bars, Oklahoma 11th on vault, Stanford 10th on bars and 11th on floor, and Utah 9th on vault and 8th on floor.

UCLA’s worst events were bars and beam (both 6th). All six, however, did well on balance beam, and because the low scores on the other events were not that low, they advanced.

In contrast, the six teams that did not advance all had terrible beam performances that essentially took them out of the running (Oregon State being the exception, they were tied with UCLA for 6th on beam, …

read more or to comment – Semifinal Statistics: Beam Decides

More terrific Utah photos posted by Chris Detrick on TribPhoto.com.

Officially.

Chellsie was the 2005 World Gymnastics Champion.

… With a total of seven World and Olympic medals, Memmel is tied with Dominique Dawes and Shawn Johnson as the fourth most decorated U.S. female gymnast in history …

Wikipedia

Click PLAY or watch a Chellsie montage on YouTube.

Subscribe to spannytampson.

by site editor Rick McCharles

Who will be the new Collegiate Gymnastics Champions, replacing Georgia?

Gymnastics Examiner:

UCLA takes the Super Six, followed by Florida and Alabama.

Why?

UCLA is the best team on floor and they have a huge advantage in that they end the meet on floor. The hit routines mount, the scores mount, the excitement mounts and the crowd gets into it. Alabama, meanwhile, is in the dreadful position of ending on beam. Championships are extremely hard to clinch on beam. …

read more – Predictions: NCAA Super Six, event finals

My prediction:

1. UCLA
2. Alabama
3. Oklahoma
4. Florida
5. Stanford
6. Utah

UCLA is in great position to win.

They had a shaky meet in prelims. Psychologically the Bruins will be wanting to prove that was a fluke.

Alabama and Oklahoma are consistent. They’ll be about the same in Team Finals. Neither is as strong as UCLA.

Florida could easily win it all. But I don’t have faith they can hit. Ashanee Dickerson fell on bars, first competitor, first rotation in prelims. I feel Florida has too much difficulty in their routines to win.

Stanford is the diametric opposite of Florida. If you are looking to win BIG betting on a long shot, pick the Cardinal. They do the smartest, cleanest routines that still start from 10.

In podium training Stanford did not vault. On Bars they did not do any dismounts. Several of the girls do not do hard landings even in competition warm-up. This is a strategy. Stanford has brilliant, gutsy coaching.

Utah should not have made the Super 6. They were over-scored on Bars big time. Can Utah hit Beam like that two days in a row? … If the universe was fair, it would be Nebraska in the Super 6. (If Nebraska had hit Beam, it would be Nebraska in the Super 6, I know.)

Super 6 commentary on Gymnastike.

Aunt Joyce, for the first time, has lost faith: … My gut feeling is that UCLA won’t pull it out. …

• NCAA’s live streaming Super Six Team Final – CBS College Sports All-Access. Fast internet connection recommended. 6PM EST start.

• official competition website

• live scoring available linked via www.GatorZone.com

• excellent live blog by Anne Phillips on Gymnastike.

Leave a comment if you have any problems. Or find other good links.

If you couldn’t care less about this meet, Longines will be posting results from European Championships all weekend.

Tragic.

Natalia Lavrova of Russia, a two-time rhythmic gymnastics Olympic champion, died in a car crash on Friday, the Interfax news agency reported.

Citing Russian authorities, the report said that the car driven by Lavrova’s sister collided with another vehicle near her home town of Penza, some 600 kilometres south-east of Moscow. Her sister reportedly died in the crash as well while the driver of the other car was injured.

Lavrova, 25, won Olympic gold 2000 and 2004 in the rhythmic gymnastics team event and later was a team coach …

Trend

It was 10AM.

Russian gymnast Yury Ryazanov was killed in a car crash last year, five days after winning a bronze medal at the world championships in London.

UPDATE

gymnast Susan Jackson is National Champion:

Here are the top five all-around finishers from the 2010 NCAA Championships:

1. Susan Jackson, LSU, 39.625
2. Casey Jo Magee, Arkansas, 39.550
3. Carly Janiga, Stanford, 39.525
4. Geralen Stack-Eaton, Alabama, 39.500
5. Brandi Personett, Penn State, 39.475 …

LSU Gym

==== original post:

No mistake on Floor today. She was the highest AA score in Session 1 of two, with 39.625.

The LSU Sport article:

… LSU senior Susan Jackson won three events in the first NCAA Gymnastics Semifinal on Thursday afternoon and leads the all-around competition with a score of 39.625.

With the three titles, Jackson advances to Saturday’s individual event finals on the vault (9.95), uneven bars (9.925) and balance beam (9.90). In her sophomore season, she won the vault national championship in 2008.

The all-around national champion will be determined after the second semifinal meet at 5 p.m. CT tonight. The highest all-around score after both semifinals will earn the title. …

Pretty Sharaya Musser from Penn State was 2nd with 39.450. CONGRATULATIONS.

Scroll to the bottom of the results page for the AA ranking.

Alabama 196.85
Florida 196.775
Stanford 196.300
Michigan 195.700
Arkansas 195.600
Missouri 194.600

Roll Tide. ‘Bama has the momentum.

On the other hand … anyone can win who gets to Super 6.

UCLA will win, me thinks.

… I’m off to the coaches party.