The LSU gymnastics team won the triangular meet against Centenary and Texas Woman’s Friday night with a score of 196.5.
Freshman Kelly Phelan scored a career high, 9.9 on the vault, while tying her career highs on the beam and floor with a score of 9.8 in both events. Phelan said she was happy with herself.
“We’ve been training hard on every event,” Phelan said. “I was expecting either that or even better, maybe a little better on floor, but I’m happy with my performance.”
Freshman Nicki Butler also set a new career high in the vault by scoring a 9.925 and winning the individual vaulting title.
“I’m a really good vaulter,” Butler said. “I’m just trying and waiting to finally stick it and be perfect on it.”
Phelan and Butler helped lead the team to the second highest team score in vaulting with a 49.4 before a dismal bar performance.
Coach D-D Breaux said the team’s performance on bars was horrible.
“Bars was awful,” Breaux said. “We talked about the let downs and that’s what happened. We got a little momentum going in vaulting and I felt like if we sustain this, then we’re going to get to 197. They went to bars and just self-destructed, fell apart. Consistency’s the name of the game and we felt the line-up we had in there tonight was a consistent line-up.”
Junior Annie Gagnon was, however, a sight for sore eyes in the bar competition as she set a new career high on bars for the second week in a row with a 9.925. Gagnon said she is glad she keeps getting better.
“It’s my favorite event by far,” Gagnon said. “It seems like every week I get a .25 higher so I gotta be happy with that, but I’m just going to try to go a 9.95 next week.”
Breaux said Gagnon is doing well in bars but she would like to see her in more than one event.
“She’s hitting bars,” Breaux said. “She’s hitting bars like that in practice, but we need her to be [in] more than one event, we need to take what she does on bars and transfer it over to that other event.”
The team’s score of 196.5 is close to their average but Breaux said they need to do better than that.
“We gotta do better than our average,” Breaux said. “We have to improve upon our average if we’re going to build a regional qualifying score that’s going to give us a great seed here at home.”
The team travels to Arkansas and Georgia in the next two weeks before coming home to compete against Kentucky on Feb. 20.