Madison Ward-Sessions shines at first home meet of the season
The Spectrum was alive with a palpable energy Friday night as the women’s gymnastics team opened up its first home meet of the season against in-state rival BYU. No. 6 ranked BYU won the meet with 194.575 over USU’s 193.950 team total, but that did not stop senior Madison Ward-Sessions from captivating the crowd with her stellar performance.
“I was nervous, but I was able to channel that into my routines, and that calmed down a little bit,” said Ward-Sessions, who secured the very first all-around title of her career with a score of 39.225. “When we were on each event, we were taking it one thing at a time.”
Beam has been a big focus for Ward-Sessions over the past few years, and she took first in the event with a personal best score of 9.800. Afterwards, she went on to win the floor event with a 9.875 score that left the crowd buzzing and winning her the floor title.
“It’s been a mental challenge for me for the past three years. I’ve trained beam, but when I go to compete I get really nervous and I forget everything pretty much, so tonight I was really focusing on all my cues.”
“Maddie has been training beam for the last two years, and she’s gotten frustrated with it where we’ve had these heart-to-heart talks of ‘it’s in there, you got this!’ and just keep chipping away at this,” said USU second-year head coach Amy Smith. “That was super cool tonight to finally see her put that together, and under a ton of pressure because the front half of the beam lineup didn’t set it up for her and she was anchoring, and she got the job done, and for her to come out and win the all-around on top of winning beam, which was great, I’m so excited for her tonight and what she did.”
“I keep saying that she could be one of the best all-arounders in the country and in our conference,” Smith continued.
Along with Ward-Sessions, sophomore teammate Leighton Varnadore placed third in the all-around with a 38.825, just behind BYU’s second-place winner Shannon Evans.
Freshman Grace Rojas made a career-best score that night with a 9.775 on the vault, which placed her at fifth for the event.
The Aggies will be hitting the gym hard this upcoming week before facing off against BYU once again.
“They gotta self-reflect tonight and ask themselves if they got the job done,” Smith said about training for next week. “We always talk about they got a job to do, and if you’re stepping up to compete, that’s what we train for. So, did you get your job done? If you didn’t, we go back and figure out what we gotta do to make it happen.”
The Aggies will head down to Provo on Jan. 25 to compete at the Marriott Center at 11 a.m. against the Cougars for the second week in a row.