Cats Deliver on Excite Night
Excite Night has always lived up to its name, providing plenty of early season spectacle.
With what Kentucky’s program has become in recent seasons, it now features some of the best January gymnastics in the nation.
Tim Garrison’s team won a battle of top-10 teams inside Rupp Arena on Friday night, with the No. 10 Wildcats taking down No. 8 Missouri with a score of 196.525. That marked an improvement of well over a point on the score UK posted in its season opener at Utah a week ago.
“There was a little bit better flow to the meet,” Garrison said. “A little bit better flow to team even with a lot of the changes we made in lineup and moving people around. They accepted it and they went for it right away instead of second-guessing themselves and being nervous about it. They took it and they ran with it. That’s a very exciting thing for us to see moving forward with a young team.”
UK’s solid score, of course, is important, but Garrison doesn’t ignore the significance of a win over a top-10 Southeastern Conference team. After all, the Cats will need to beat teams just like Missouri a couple months from now when postseason play begins.
“Come SEC championships and NCAA qualifications, competing against these big teams, especially being in the SEC, I think comes really big to us,” Mollie Korth said.
Kentucky closed the meet with scores of 49-plus scores on each of its final three rotations. That culminated in a floor routine by Korth, who closed the night with her third score of 9.925 to clinch the individual all-around title for the second straight week. The crowd of 11,952, of course, loved it.
“It’s amazing,” Korth said of the crowd. “I’m walking along the sidelines and all the little girls are saying my name and I look up and wave. Just to know that they have my back and that kind of support. My dad always said that there’s so many girls looking up to you. I have to carry that role model aspect of my life and I’m so glad to have that.”
The defending SEC Gymnast of the Week, Korth has certainly thrived in that role through the first three years of her Kentucky career. Now, as a senior leading a team that had 10 routines performed by freshmen and sophomores, Korth plans to take her game to another level.
So too does a Kentucky program coming off the best seasons in program history.
“They have a perfect image in front of them of what they have to do to be successful at this level,” Garrison said. “They’re going to take that and they’re going to embrace that.”
