Before the start of this weekend's tri meet at Temple University, Penn State men's gymnastics coach Randy Jepson gave his team a little reminder of history. He told them that when the Lions won the NCAA Championship in 1976, they did it at Temple University, the site of this year's NCAA Championships.
With aspirations of accomplishing their overall season goal, the Nittany Lions did not lose sight of their task at hand by defeating No. 6 Illinois and No. 8 Temple in a close meet Saturday afternoon. The Illini were within one point of the Lions the entire meet and trailed them by .3 points heading into the final event. Despite the very slim lead, the Lions were confident in pulling out another victory.
"I told the guys that if we were leading Illinois going into the vault, we were going to win because Illinois had to finish on the parallel bars, a much harder event to post good scores," men's gymnast Kevin Donohue said.
The Lions scored a 37.200 on vault compared to Illinois' 34.800 on the parallel bars to secure the 216.050-213.350 victory. Temple finished third with a score of 207.450. William and Mary was scheduled to compete in the meet, but could not make it due to inclement weather.
In addition to the team's overall victory, senior Kevin Donohue finished first (54.200) in the all-around and first in the floor while freshman teammate Luis Vargas finished third (52.050). Kevin Tan posted a season high 9.750 to capture first place in the rings. Also sophomores Ludwig Kern and Ed Seward placed first in vault and high bar. Donohue and Vargas are both coming off top ten finishes at the Winter Cup Challenge last weekend, which helped them compete well during the competition.
"We definitely had an advantage with competing last weekend at Winter Cup," Donohue said. "With the more meets you compete in, the more confident you become during competitions."
The rest of the Lions have had a two-week layoff from competition and Jepson feels that the team was a little rusty from the layoff.
"We were rather sloppy this weekend," Jepson said. "There was mixed results, some guys came through for us and others did not."
Donohue agreed that the team put in a good effort but wasn't as sharp as they would like to be. With senior Jose Palacios only competing in three events because of a sore elbow, Jepson used a different lineup to give some guys experience because of the depth of their team. But Jepson thinks that the Lions should have scored in the 218.500 range this past weekend and need to practice on routines to hopefully make a trip back to Temple University at a chance for their 11th NCAA Championship.
