FORT WORTH, Texas — After the LSU gymnastics team imploded at the NCAA Semifinals on Friday, the six Tigers who qualified for the individual event finals failed to take home a national championship Sunday at the Fort Worth Convention Center.
Freshman Myia Hambrick began the day on vault for LSU (25-6, 7-0 Southeastern Conference). She was followed by senior Rheagan Courville, junior Randii Wyrick and sophomore Shae Zamardi on bars. The Tigers then moved to beam and floor, where senior Jessie Jordan and sophomore Ashleigh Gnat competed, respectively.
A panel of six judges calculated the scores on each event, and their tallies were averaged together to form an overall score for each gymnast.
Hambrick finished in eighth place on vault by tallying a 9.8167. She qualified for the event finals with a vault score of 9.950 at the semifinals.
The team then moved to bars, where Courville turned in the final performance of her illustrious LSU career. She led the trio of bars performers in a tie for fifth place with a score of 9.900. Zamardi and Wyrick followed at 9.8625 and 9.2875, respectively.
Jordan joined Courville in their last performance for the Tigers, scoring a 9.8250 for an eighth-place finish on beam. Despite Jordan’s inability to take home the national beam title, LSU gymnastics coach D-D Breaux called her the “most consistent gymnast in school history.”
Breaux said Jordan was out of her element because she was competing as an individual rather than for the team.
“As many times as she was All-American, as many times as she has closed a beam lineup for us and saved us, this was her first time here,” Breaux said. “The feeling of ‘I am out here doing it for myself’ was strange for her. I was so proud of her.”
Gnat grabbed the lead in the individual floor finals with a 9.9125, which kept her in first place until Florida’s Kytra Hunter tallied a 9.9625. Gnat finished in a tie for fifth place.
Breaux thought it was good for LSU to be able to compete Sunday after her team’s season ended on beam in the semifinal. The Tigers, who were in third place after two events, suffered a 48.275 on beam, the team’s lowest event score of the season.
“It was mostly mental,” Hambrick said. “We had trouble in warm-up, but instead of brushing it off, they just kind of let it sit on them a little bit. But there is nothing we can do about it now.”
The collapse on beam put the No. 4-seeded Tigers in a hole too deep to climb out of. After spending the entire regular season ranked in the top three nationally, LSU failed to place third or better in the six-team semifinal and missed the cut for the Super Six.
Breaux said she did not have much to tell her team after its collapse on Friday. Her main message was the semifinals did not define the team’s success this season.
“I told them not to hang their heads,” Breaux said. “Let me be angry. Maybe I made a lineup judgement that I should not have made. But the main message was that this does not say how our season was.”
Though the Tigers fell short of their goal and will lose one of the most decorated senior classes in program history, Breaux said LSU gymnastics still has a bright future.
“The future is so good,” Breaux said. “Our team is going to be very youthful next year. We are very excited. Our recruits have been texting us not to let Friday night define our season. They have said, ‘This does not define us, our future will live on.’”
You can reach Christian Boutwell on Twitter @CBoutwell_TDR.