Gymnastics readies for Top 25 Minnesota, Illinois
Following the record-setting event scores last weekend in their home-opening win, the women’s gymnastics team will look to match that against two of the nation’s top teams.
Central Michigan will bring its 8-0 record on the road when the team faces off against No. 13 ranked University of Minnesota and No. 19 University of Illinois at 6 p.m. Saturday.
Minnesota (3-1) is coming off recent wins against Michigan State and Air Force, while Illinois (3-2-1) has defeated Penn State and Iowa.
After reaching their season high total score of 195 last weekend against Northern Illinois, head coach Jerry Reighard said that their score should help with the team’s confidence going into the second half of the season.
“Regionally this is going to be a huge boost for us,” Reighard said. “It is a really big psychological edge that we need to have going into the second half of the season.”
The squad will look to junior Kristin Teubner, who set season highs on the both the vault (9.850) and on the floor exercise (9.925). Teubner also notched a season-high in the all-around category with an event winning 39.250.
Looking for a repeat performance from her season highs last weekend, freshman Brittany Petzold will shoot to build upon her 38.150 all-around performance. Petzold scored higher than a 9.725 in all four events, including a 9.875 on the bars. The reason for the high scores, both team and individually, were because of the attention to detail and the ability to correct minor mistakes.
“We had certain parts that we had to fix and I feel like we all achieved that,” Petzold said.
That attention to detail will need to be a focus again this weekend as they take on a Minnesota and Illinois squads that average 194.819 and 194.563 total points, respectively.
In order for CMU to match the past weekend’s highs, Reighard said that the mistakes that have plagued them from the beginning, such as landings, need to be constantly worked on and improved in practice.
“Those small things are usually in landings where we need to be just slightly different, but the gymnasts are very concerned obviously about not falling,” Reighard said.
The event that has seen the most growth this season is the balance beam where the Chippewas rank No. 14 nationally with a per meet average of score of 48.538, sitting only .662 points from the No. 1 ranked team Stanford (49.200).
