After disappointing performances in their first two events at Saturday’s NCAA Regional competition, the Red Rocks headed to the locker rooms for a much-needed bye. During their rest time, the team got some strong words from their captains.
Georgia Dabritz and Corrie Lothrop — who didn’t struggle at all, finishing in the top two spots in the All-Around competition — weren’t very happy with their teammates, and they let them know it.
“I told them they had two decisions,” Dabritz said. “They could either sit there and sulk and continue to be upset about what happened or they could get back out there and prove they are Utah. If we don’t go out there and hit those last two events we are leaving our fate in another team’s hands and we don’t have control of what they do, but we do have control of what we do, let’s go out there and hit.”
Dabritz said that during the bye she was nervous the Utes might actually miss the national meet for the first time in program history, and knew that her team needed two strong events to make it into nationals.
The pep talk (or lecture) from Dabritz and Lothrop apparently did the job, as Utah came out of its bye and was able to secure the second spot in the region, and punch its ticket to Forth Worth, Texas for the NCAA National Championship meet.
Utes get 12th seed at nationals, will be in semifinal No. 1
The Red Rocks may have been the No. 3 team in the nation heading into the regional competitions, but their score on Saturday was the lowest of all the teams that qualified for the national meet, putting them as the 12th seed in Fort Worth.
“It definitely sucks,” Lothrop said about the seed. “Regionals wasn’t a good depiction of what we’ve been doing and what we’ve been training for. We can go into nationals letting that bother us, or with the idea that we have nothing to lose, because literally we have nothing to lose, and we can give it our all and hope for the best.”
Utah co-head coach Megan Marsden actually thinks the low seed might help ease some pressure off the Red Rocks.
“I like that position, I don’t think it can hurt being there, I think there are other teams that will be feeling more pressure than we are,” Marsden said.
The Utes will be in semifinal No. 1, going up against Florida, Stanford, UCLA, Michigan and Georgia. Utah has competed against all of the teams in its semifinal this season, except the Gators. The Utes have beaten UCLA and Stanford twice this year — once in a dual meet and once at the Pac-12 Championships. Utah also defeated Michigan in a dual meet. The Utes, however, lost to Georgia during the regular season, as well as last Saturday at the NCAA Regional competition.
Florida is No. 2 in the nation, and the defending National Champion.
Lewis thrives in place of Wilson
The Red Rocks posted their lowest score of the season on Saturday, and it may be easy to point to senior Tory Wilson’s absence as the reason, but that wasn’t the case.
“What I like is that if you look at the details of our scores it’s obvious we had mistakes and that’s what cost us from being one of those top seeds,” Marsden said. “If you don’t know much about our scores, people think, ‘Oh they lost Tory so they are not the team they were,’ but as much as I love Tory and what she has done for us, Tiffani Lewis was unbelievable replacing her and scoring nearly what Tory was doing. She was someone I was really proud of.”
Lewis posted a 9.850 on vault, a 9.825 on bars and a 9.850 on floor.
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