The travel weary No. 14 LSU gymnastics team earned its highest road score of the season, 196.025, at the Masters Classic on Sunday at Nebraska’s Bob Devaney Sports Center. The Tigers’ flight schedule faced many delays and layoffs that extended their trip to Nebraska.
“We traveled for 15 hours on Saturday then competed on Sunday, so we were pretty tired,” said junior Lindsay Beddow.
LSU started the meet with the floor exercise. Throughout the season the floor has been the Tigers’ best event. Although they did not have to count a fall and scored 48.800 on the floor, the Tigers did not have one of their better floor performances.
Freshman Rikki L’Heureux led the team in its second rotation on the vault with a performance that tied her career vault high of 9.800, but the Tigers placed third in vault with a score of 48.725.
“We started off a little slow on the first two events, but the team stuck with it and turned in two excellent rotations to finish off the meet,” said LSU head coach D-D Breaux.
Last week in Alabama LSU counted one fall on the uneven bars and three on the balance beam. Both events have been rather unfriendly to the Tigers this season, but Beddow and freshman Kelly Lea led the Tigers to their second best performance of the season on bars scoring 9.825. Beddow led the way on the beam, posting a career-high of 9.900 along with freshman Megan Durning.
Breaux attributed much of the Tigers trouble to an inability to perform well on the road because most of the LSU gymnasts lack experience in high pressure situations. Beddow said she felt it was time for the team to perform to their potential and begin to turn things around.
“When I thought about the meet I thought, ‘this needs to be our turning point,’ and I think we did just that,” Beddow said.
No. 5 Nebraska won the Masters Classic team title for the ninth straight time with its highest score of the season, 198.025. Washington, the No. 10 team in the nation, placed second scoring 196.725, No. 14 LSU finished third with 196.025 and No. 18 Kent State took fourth with a score of 192.900.
Although it did not finish first, LSU’s performance will help in its bid for a high regional seating. It takes time for an individual to learn a routine and be comfortable enough with it to begin adding more difficulty, according to Beddow.
“We need to be at the point where we aren’t worrying about our landings but doing our routines the best we can,” Beddow said.