LSU Meet Notes in PDF Format
The 18th-ranked University of Kentucky gymnastics team travels to Baton Rouge, La., to take on No. 10 Louisiana State on Friday, March 1. Action is set to get underway in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center at 7 p.m. CT. This is UK’s final Southeastern Conference road meet of the regular season.
“This is going to be a tough meet,” Coach Leah Little said. “Whenever you meet a SEC team on the road, you have your hands full. This is a very good LSU team, but we are excited by our performances the past few weeks. This team now knows it capabilities and will look to continue improving.”
UK (7-4, 1-2 SEC) is coming off its first SEC win with a 196.000-194.025 victory over Auburn last week. The score nearly matched the school record of 196.100, which was set on Feb. 15 against Ball State. Before this season, the previous record was 195.875, which was set in 1996 in a tri-meet against George Washington and Radford and was tied last year against Illinois. The GymKats scored the second-highest totals of the season last week on the uneven bars (49.175), the balance beam (48.650) and the floor exercise (49.225), while they scored the season’s No. 3 total on vault with a 48.950.
The GymKats’ No. 18 ranking comes from its 194.320 regional qualifying score, which also ranks UK third in the Central Region. Individually, Julie Joy leads UK in the national and regional rankings. Her bar RQS of 9.855 has her ranked 17th in the country and fourth in the Central Region, while she is ranked 12th on the floor exercise and 13th on the vault regionally. Jessie Lemp is ranked regionally on bars at ninth and the balance beam at 16th. On the vault, Julia Gore stands at ninth in the region.
Aronda Primault and Michelle Gales also are performing well for UK. On the team, the pair are one-two on the floor exercise with each scoring a career-best on the apparatus this season. Primault has tallied a 9.925, while Gales has scored a high of 9.950 to go along with four additional scores of 9.900 or better. The two are not ranked this week because they lack one of the requisite away scores in each event to calculate an RQS.
Primault and Joy also lead the way in the all-around. Primault is averaging a 39.058 and Joy has a 38.933 average. They each scored a career-high against Ball State to finish first and second as Primault tallied a 39.350 and Joy scored a 39.325.
LSU (5-6, 2-1) comes into the meet ranked No. 2 in the Central Region and undefeated at home. The Tigers’ RQS stands at 195.465, which includes a season-high 196.925 that came on Feb. 8 in a win over Alabama. The Tigers opened the season with a fifth-place finish at the Super Six Challenge but have gone 4-2 in their last six meets.
