Landes leads way as Aggies ground Air Force
The Utah State University gymnastics team pulled off its second win of the season on Friday against the Air Force Falcons with a final score of 193.575 – 193.200.
However, the score wasn’t enough for head coach Jeff Richards, who said in order to qualify for regionals, the team needs to pull off a 195.
“We’re coming out with nerves or something,” Richards said. “I can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but it is nice to have the win. We’ve got to work on some things. We’ve got to get our scores up there if we’re gonna be top-36 to make it to regionals. As a team we’ve gotta be scoring 195’s.”
The Aggies kept a steady two-point lead for the first two rotations. After vault, the uneven bars and beam, USU held a slim .5 lead over Air Force.
Preparing for the final rotation, USU on the floor exercise and Air Force on the balance beam, all-around winner Sarah Landes said she didn’t realize the scores were close, but Richards did.
“I knew it was close,” Richards said. “Coming into floor, it shouldn’t make you nervous, but after our performance last home meet, I was a little bit nervous.”
At the last home meet on Jan. 26, the Aggies faltered in their final rotation, which ultimately cost them a first-place finish.
“We hadn’t been doing a whole lot of floor,” Richards said. “We were nursing some injuries, so going into it we kind of knew that we were trying to put some things together, that it was going to be touch and go.”
Despite the nerves before the floor routines, the Aggies came out on top and scored a 48.325.
“We stepped it up in practice and you can see, going down to Southern, we had a great meet on floor,” Richards said. “Really this tonight, I was pretty pleased with how they did. Our landings just weren’t that crisp.”
Though they didn’t get a 195.000, USU still won the meet led by recurring top performer Sarah Landes.
“I felt pretty confident because of how we’ve done this season and how we’ve progressed and built on ourselves,” Landes said. “I knew that if we came in and did our stuff like we know how to do it, we would pull off the win.”
For the Aggies’ next meet, Richards knows exactly what his team needs to work on to pull off his desired score: the balance beam.
“We got a little bit of work to do in the gym,” Richards said. “We’ll do a little more pressure sets in there and put the pressure on them and hopefully that’ll make them feel a little better out here.”
Landes is confident her teammates can step up to the competition in San Jose on Friday.
“We had a little bit of a rough meet tonight,” Landes said. “We had some bobbles here and there, so we expect next week to go in, pull ourselves back together and be able to hit a strong meet, build on the score we got last weekend, everything we did this week.”
The Aggies travel to San Jose State to face the Spartans and Brown University on Friday, Feb. 15 at 8 p.m.
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Twitter: @daniellekmanley