We repped for RU at the gymnastics meet today in Tucson. Didn't see any other Rutgers folks there but there may well have been. Three of the 4 schools involved wore a shade of red. The arena is beautiful and must really rock when the U of A plays men's bball there. There were perhaps 3000 fans there, many of them girl scouts who were admitted after selling cookies.
Never having been to a meet before, I was curious to see what it was like. It's certainly more civil than most sporting events. There was no booing, people politely or strongly applauded all of the athletes, and loudly supported the home team throughout.
As a quad meet, it seemed like a four-ring circus to my untrained eye. Women's gymnastics, as in the Olympics, features four events and with four teams, each was on one apparatus in all four rounds, so that four things were happening all the time. It was impossible to keep track of it all. If I ever attend another meet, I'll make sure it's a dual, which would be far easier to follow.
There was also a lot of music involved. Each person doing the floor exercise had her own music selection going on, often having to wait till other music seemingly unrelated to one of the other three simultaneous events had finished. Somehow, the athletes on the beam, doing the vault, and on the uneven bars, must be able to tune it out as they didn't seem to be all that distracted by it, though several did fall off of the beam.
As for the results, Arizona entered ranked #13 and Iowa State was #25. Rutgers and Western Michigan were not ranked. WMU aside, the competition was rather close with RU chasing the two ranked teams but always falling a bit behind. From what we could see, the primary difference was the Rutgers gymnasts weren't sticking their landings after otherwise fine routines. The U of A women were superb at sticking their landings and ISU did a rather good job as well. Had that problem been solved, RU would have been in the thick of the race to the finish.
Reading about the meet on Scarlet,knights.com, I saw mention that RU's two leading scorers tied for the "all around." I'm not sure if the article was referring to leading RU in the "all around" or if it meant that they tied for the "all around" title for the entire meet. If anyone knows, please clarify this. I did not hear this announced at the arena and we did wait till the team scores were announced, in ascending order.
RU finished with a team score of just shy of 195.00, which sounds like a pretty good score. Not knowing RU's gymnastics history, I can't say for sure but perhaps others here who are more familiar with the team can comment.
thanks.
