The UC Davis gymnastics team scored a season-high 191.550 last Saturday in a triangular, but it wasn’t enough to exceed No. 4 Stanford, No. 10 Oregon State, or personal expectations.
The host Cardinal won the meet with a 197.025, and the Beavers followed with a 196.600.
“Our real goal Sunday was to hopefully come in and have a very good performance,” coach John Lavallee said. “I think we fell short of that. Overall I don’t think we’ve really found a place we want to be yet.“
Though not up to standards on the whole, the Aggies still had plenty of bright spots. Chief among them was the 48.825 floor score, the Aggies‘ highest in the event since 2007. Senior co-captain Andi Dolinsky led the way with a season-high 9.850.
“It felt really good,” Dolinsky said. “I had a lot of trouble on my warm-up getting my passes all nailed down, so to hit them in the meet felt really good.“
Freshman Erika Van Dyke and junior Kendall McCann both posted career highs in the floor exercise, earning a 9.800 and 9.750, respectively.
Led by Michelle Bobonski’s 9.750, UC Davis had its best night on the vault all season with a 48.300.
“Our vault squad got a 48 for the first time this season, and that’s a really good thing,” Dolinsky said. “It’s something we’ve been working for.“
Still, the Aggies had trouble on both bars and beam, recording their second lowest scores of the season on both.
“We had a rough opening event and a rough closing event,” Dolinsky said. “But we had a really good vault and floor in the middle of the meet. The ones on the end were really iffy. We had some weird mistakes, kind of fluky kind of things. But we also had several season highs by people too. It had its ups and downs. One of those meets.“
Two of those highlights on otherwise sub-par events came from junior Lida Gehlen, who posted a 9.775 on bars – the same score she recorded at Stanford last week – and McCann’s career-high 9.775 on beam.
“We’re still struggling with staying on overall,” Lavallee said. “But we had a lot of really good things happen today as well. Not exactly what we were hoping for but still high marks for the season. So that’s good.“
The Aggies will be hosting Mountain Pacific Sports Federation member and rival Seattle Pacific at the Pavilion this Friday at 7 p.m. There they hope to have a better showing and get another win.
“It was okay,” Dolinsky said of the team’s performance overall. “It wasn’t what we wanted to do, but it wasn’t a complete disaster. There were definitely some good moments, but not what we wanted going in.
“We have a home meet against our rival Seattle Pacific on Friday, so that should be fun. When we get to come back and be at home, it’s always nice.“
ALEX WOLF-ROOT can be reached at sports@theaggie.org.
