Struggles on beam doom Georgia Gymdogs in home meet against No. 3 Florida

While the No. 3 Florida Gators were dazzling and chomping on the floor, the home Gymdogs were struggling to hit on the balance beam. One-by-one, a gymnast fell to the ground and had to be cheered back onto the beam to continue her routine.

It wasn't expected for Georgia to struggle like they did in the event. But it happened, and Georgia coach Courtney Kupets Carter said she doesn’t know why.

“I’m going to get to the bottom of that and regroup with the team on Monday,” she said when asked what contributed to the score. “I do not have that answer for you, but it’s something that I’m going to look into.”

When all was said and done, Georgia scored just a 46.6250 on balance beam, down from the 48.3750 it scored two weeks ago in the season opener at Michigan. Senior Mikayla Magee’s 9.8250 and Soraya Hawthorne’s 9.3000 were the only two scores on beam above 9.2000.

“I still believe that this beam team can be super strong,” senior Rachel Baumann said. “We just need to show it, go back into the gym, put up some more numbers and have the confidence we need to go into the next meet.”

The falls on beam for Georgia was the biggest difference Friday night as Florida remained unbeaten, winning 196.975-194.475.

The confidence that Baumann alluded to just wasn’t there for the gymnasts in black and white leotards. From the first apparatus to the final rotation, gymnasts dressed in royal blue and white leotards performed like the better team in the room.

Florida’s beam rotation was also its lowest score, but the 49.0250 was better than Georgia’s score. Trinity Thomas’ mount of the beam was one of the more impressive moves of the night, with the 2020 SEC gymnast of the year running and jumping onto the beam. She earned a 9.9500 for the performance.

“We work so hard in the gym. It’s just about bringing that confidence into the competition,” Baumann said. “The main thing we can focus on is transferring that confidence we have to the meet.”

The Gymdogs’ biggest display of confidence came in the next-to-last showcase of the night. Baumann’s floor routine scored a perfect 10. Perhaps even more impressive, the perfect score came just minutes after the demons on beam wrapped up.

“We had, what I’m going to call ‘the biggest fluke I’ve ever seen our team do,’ on the balance beam,” Kupets Carter said. “Looking at the progress they made, even on beam, every other skill that they showed was fantastic.”

Baumann, whose sister competes for Florida, knew after the first pass that her routine could be special. Kupets Carter knew it too.

“When I went up, I was so confident in this floor lineup that I was just able to relax, have fun, do what I love to do and dance,” said Baumann. “I landed that last pass and it was a good feeling. Honestly I didn’t realize (I hit a 10) until they turned the scores around. It’s still unreal.”

Baumann is the first Gymdog to score a 10 on the event since Marissa Oakley hit a perfect score on bars at the 2019 Athens Regional.

But even with a 10 on the scoreboard, Florida was better.

In fairness, this was also just Georgia’s second meet since the NCAA Regionals last April. The Gymdogs opened the 2022 campaign at defending national champion and No. 1 Michigan on Jan. 6. Georgia lost to the host Wolverines, 197.750-194.500.

Then they had an unscheduled two-week layover, due to COVID, where meets at Kentucky and against Iowa were forced to be postponed to later in the season.

“Some of the team did have a larger break during those two weeks,” Kupets Carter said.

“The rest of them — we continued to do meet run throughs with everyone else that was there. It was just three to four athletes in some of the events, but we were still trying to make it upbeat and give them as much experience going into the next weekend as we could.”

The Georgia coaching staff will need to keep spirits upbeat through the next week, as another Top 5 SEC team comes to Athens with LSU competing in Stegeman next Friday. Once Kupets Carter diagnoses the errors on beam, the team can continue to move forward and be where she feels they can be.

“Even when you’re on a super high and have to calm down a little bit from one event to the other, it’s about just focusing them in on exactly what they need to do to hit their routine that they’re focused on,” she said. “Our goal is to go into every meet and hit every routine. Clearly we have not done that yet and that is still our mission to do. Once we do that, I know we can be a Top 10 team.”

McClain Baxley is a recruiting reporter for the Athens Banner-Herald and the USA TODAY Network. Reach him by email at mbaxley@onlineathens.com or on Twitter at @mcclainbaxley.

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: What went wrong in the Georgia Gymdogs 2022 home opener?