Senior gymnasts sent out with season's third-highest score
Published March 14, 2007
With senior Ali Gilmore setting her career high the week before, another MU senior matched her career high during Senior Night on Friday against Iowa.
This week it was Whitney Crater, who matched her career high of 9.9 on vault, a feat she had already accomplished four times in her career. It was the first time she had reached the score this season because she has been recovering from an Achilles tear late last season.
"It felt great because vault has just been kind of really iffy," Crater said. "Either I have a really good landing but not a really good vault or a really good vault and I couldn't get the landing together, and it was really good tonight to feel like I finally got the full package together and just nailed it the way I used to know how."
Crater's performance came just one week after Gilmore scored a 9.875 on bars at Pittsburgh.
On the opposite end of the team's age spectrum, there was another career high on vault. Freshman Danielle Guider, immediately following junior Nikki Bowman's 9, scored a career high of 9.825. For coach Rob Drass, there is a feeling that Guider, who scored a 9.75 on beam and 9.80 on floor, has made the adjustments freshmen need to make and is competing at another level.
"She's really just starting to come into her own," he said. "She led us off on floor with the best routine she's done this year. Probably that's her best vault she did all year, and it was a good solid beam routine. I think she's maturing. She's not acting like a freshman anymore."
Guider said as the season has continued, she has gotten more comfortable competing.
"Sometimes I feel more like a freshman," she said. "But now I feel more comfortable when I go out there."
The team was without junior Ashley Khederian, a staple in the vault, bars and floor lineups, because she was out with a sore knee. Drass said she is expected back for next week's meet at Michigan.
Despite that loss, the team's score of 195.425 is its third-best score of the season. It removed the 195 score from the Jan. 26 meet against Nebraska from the Regional Qualifying Score. But the team's score of 196.075 on February 23 remains a drop as the team's highest score, something Drass said can change.
"We're far from maxed out," he said.
But next week's meet and the meet on March 23 at Arkansas have even more ranking implications. Since it is on the road, the team can rid it's RQS of the 193.825 scored on Jan. 19 at Oklahoma.
"We know that they can be big meets for us," Gilmore said. "They can raise our RQS a lot. We know we have the potential to max out our RQS."
Although the gymnasts look at the RQS, their focus doesn't change from just trying to hit all of their routines to the best of their ability.
"It's good to know where we stand," sophomore Adrianne Perry said. "But we try not to focus too much on scores because, like I said, we can't do too much about scoring."