by David F.P.

Down the train line from Kingston Rhode Island is New Haven Connecticut home to two collegiate teams, the D1 Ivy League Yale Bulldogs and the D2 Southern Connecticut Owls. Joining them in competition was Connecticut’s third team the D2 Bridgeport Purple Knights (Who feature clashing swords at the start of each floor routine.)

I don’t have results because the meet went longer than I could stay today. (It’s an unusually busy weekend for me.) So if anyone has them or insights into the floor and beam performances of the teams that’d be great.

All three schools now have their meet reports up. Yale won with what I believe is their highest score of the season.

A tip of the hat to Bridgeport though, one of their gymnasts had a tough fall on Bars, but resumed her routine and finished before obviously having to deal with some pain. Another had their floor music cut out and had to finish the routine musicless. More on the skills to come.

I’m having bad luck getting to see SCSU or Yale’s floor routines so I don’t have much to say yet.

My first impressions follow, I hope to add more detail as time goes on, but I’m still learning about the exact moves and difficulties.

On floor, Bridgeport implies an interesting variety of music and routines. At SCSU it looked like they stuck (or nearly stuck) every tumbling pass. The question would be start value. There was a mix of layouts and flips, but also twists and combinations of that nature. On the bars Bridgeport had a mix, the team had two falls (and presumably had to count one) though was doing a good job of hitting dismounts with either steps or actual sticking of the landings. The falls were coming not on high bar release moves but transitions instead, as the team hit all its high bar releases. Otherwise the team seemed solid to my untrained eye on the Unevens.

On the vault the team had a lot of stepping and stumbling on the landings. The vault was farther away so I want to watch the videos more before commenting on the vaults themselves. For the most part the landings were under control.

SCSU had a bunch of vaults that involved small steps here and there on the landings. On the Uneven Bars SCSU also looked solid, with no falls, hitting all their releases and dismounts ranged from stuck landings to steps. A lot of SCSU’s dismounts looked similar though I’ll check.

It was hard to see full beam routines and I missed their FX.

Yale also looked pretty solid on the Bars, looked like their was some stuck or close to stuck landings. One fall on bars. The rest of the release moves were hit. Dismounts seemed to go pretty well. There was a very interesting variety of moves. Each routine seemed to have a different aspect to it that made those routines seem more varied than the other two teams, though that’s just impressions.

On Vault there were a lot of steps. Though it looked to me like the Yale Gymnast whose vaults consisted entirely of twists stuck hers. I can’t be certain.