Sophomore Ariana Castrence set a career-high and the program record in all-around points with 39.275 in Temple’s (2-2) first win of the 2020 season. The team topped their opponents in the vault, uneven parallel bars, and balance beam categories. Temple tallied an overall score of 190.675.
The win came at McGonigle Hall, the first home meet for the team since March 10, 2019.
“It’s very important, the crowd’s very important,” Castrence said. “And we love home meets because we have a familiar crowd and they’re very supportive. So it really plays a part feeding off their energy and pushing it into ourselves essentially.”
Castrence placed first in vault results with a score of 9.800, closely followed by senior Jaylene Everett who scored 9.650.
“You really just have to separate each event for what it is because at the end of the day you can have a restart in every event and you have to keep pushing,” Castrene said.
In uneven parallel bar results, Castrence finished in first place with a score of 9.800 and junior Tori Edwards placed third with a score of 9.650.
Castrence placed first in balance beam results with a score of 9.825 while junior Delaney Garin and junior Jordyn Oster finished second and third with scores of 9.800 and 9.725 respectively.
In the floor exercise results, Temple placed in the top three with Castrence posting a score of 9.850, Oster tallying a 9.750 score, and Edwards recording a score of 9.725. Castrence completed her night with an all-around score of 39.275 which was the top score among her opponents.
“Well, what I told them at the end was, we need to make a couple small adjustments, and that’s it,” said coach Josh Nilson. “If we do that every week, we’ll be great when we’re supposed to be great, which is going into conferences and going into regionals. So really all we need to do is a little bit better at West Virginia.”
Five Temple gymnasts were unable to play, and coach Nilson spoke on the reason behind their absence.
“We were very sick this week though, I mean truly we had five of our fifteen get the flu,” Nilson said. “So we had three key players out for this meet. We had a fourth that is going to be ready in eight more days, so all of that aside they showed a lot of team chemistry.”
Temple will face the University of New Hampshire (2-1, 1-0 East America Gymnastics League) and West Virginia University (0-2, 0-1 Big 12 Conference) on Sunday, Jan. 26 at Morgantown, West Virginia.
I’ve been watching college gymnastics for years and my granddaughter loves gymnastics and is now old enough to take to meets. I will make a little girl very happy to take her, so will be interested I. Getting your schedule. Great job!!!!