Behind a home crowd, Buckeyes advance to NCAA men’s gymnastics final
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — It came down to the final rotation. But at the end of the night, the Ohio State men’s gymnastics team did enough to have a shot at an NCAA championship.
Hosting the year-end meet for the first time in program history, the Buckeyes finished third in the team standings of the night session, behind Oklahoma (418.957) and Michigan (418.954), to advance to Saturday night’s national championship, scoring 408.725 points, just 3.302 ahead of Penn State, who finished fourth.
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“That means a lot for us. Again this is not over. We have a second day. We still have room to improve, anything can happen,” Buckeyes head coach Rustam Sharipov said. “We’re going to do everything we can and then we’ll see tomorrow.”
Ohio State was in fourth after every rotation except the last, using strong vaults from Zach Snyder, Chase Davenport-Mills and Kazuki Hayashi to propel the Buckeyes into third. Snyder and Davenport-Mills stuck their landings and all three scored 14.466 or higher to finish in the top ten in the event. Combined with vaults from Justin Ciccone and Kameron Nelson, the Buckeyes had its best event of the night, scoring 72.331 in the final rotation.
“We picked our parallel bars event to start on, knowing that we’d be down the whole time up until we went to vault because vault is the highest scoring event,” senior Donovan Hewitt said. “So that was the strategy that we picked. Being the captain, I had to make sure that everyone was aware of that as we were going.”
The Buckeyes, along with the Sooners and Wolverines, will compete against the top three teams from the afternoon session, including Big Ten programs Nebraska (413.123) and Illinois (410.461) as well as four-time defending champion Stanford (417.389). Participating gymnasts will also be competing for event titles and those taking part in all six apparatus will be vying for the individual all-around championship. Saturday’s final is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. at the Covelli Center.
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