All weekend long at the NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships in Fort Worth Texas, Utah senior Georgia Dabritz dominated the uneven bars, and on Sunday she was crowned champion.
Dabritz scored a 9.625 on bars in Sunday’s NCAA individual event championships, to win her first career national championship.
“It feels great to be able to end my career this way,” Dabritz said. “I just wanted to do one last bar routine for me and I couldn’t have asked for a better ending. It feels great to be at the top of the group I was competing against. We wanted to win first (as a team), but we are so pleased with second place.”
The individual championship should help ease the sting of the Utes coming up .05 points short of the team national championship, Saturday night.
Dabritz’s winning score was only her third best performance on bars this weekend. She scored a perfect 10.0 in the national semifinals on Friday, and during Saturday’s Super Six Finals. Some also saw perfection from the Ute senior again on Sunday, with two of the six judges giving Dabritz a 10.0.
The win doesn’t just mark the first national title for Dabritz, it’s also the first for Utah bars coach Tom Farden, who has been with the team since 2011.
Dabritz is the first Ute gymnast to win an NCAA event title since Ashley Postell won on beam in 2007. The last Utah bars title came in 2006, won by Kristina Baskett.
Dabritz also competed in the floor scoring a 9.9125 to tie for fifth in the event.
Freshman Kari Lee was the other Ute competing individually on Sunday. Lee finished fifth on vault with a 9.875, and was having a good routine on floor before she stepped out of bounds at the end of her last tumbling pass, and had to settle for a 9.1625.
“It was so much fun, especially experiencing it with Georgia,” Lee said. “She was right by my side supporting me. I was a little gassed at the end of floor exercise. I was pretty tired competing for three straight days, but for my first nationals, it was great! I saw a lot of people come up to Georgia and say, ‘you are so perfect.’ Everyone respects her because she is so consistent on every event all the time.”
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