Sports

Westfield Defeats SP-F Gymnastics Team

The Raiders posted their highest score of the season during the meet.

The Westfield girls’ varsity gymnastics team remains perfect despite an imperfect meet.

Westfield defeated Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School 108.65 to 106.05 on Tuesday to improve to 7-0 on the season. A combination of a season-high score from Scotch Plains (7-3) and a relatively low score for Westfield made the outcome much closer than Westfield coach Melissa Bryan would have liked.

“Scotch Plains looked fantastic,” Bryan said. “They really put forth a lot of effort today. As for my team, we pulled it out at the end, but in reality I don’t think we lived up to our potential.”

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SP-F’s score of 106.05 was the highest the team scored in the past four seasons, according to coach Lisa Cerchio.

“We came out here today hoping to beat our season high at this meet and we did,” Cerchio said. The score beats the previous mark of 105.95 set earlier this year.

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But, the season-best effort was still not enough to power past the strong Westfield gymnasts, who were listed as the 5th best team in New Jersey going into the meet, according to the Star Ledger’s Oct. 11 rankings.

Westfield gained a slight lead after the first event – the vault – when Lacy Cummings stuck the landing on her second attempt, scoring a meet-high 9.5. The lead would only grow as Westfield’s Jenna Rodrigues proceeded to win the next two events with a 9.1 on uneven bars and a 9.3 on balance beam.

Rodrigues turned in her best score in the floor exercise (9.4) – finishing with the highest all-around score in the meet (36.5) – but would have to take second place in the final event behind Scotch Plain’s Alex Peluso’s 9.425 on floor.

Peluso finished as the best all-around performer for Scotch Plains with a 36.1 total score – just ahead of teammate Lindsay Robinson (35.325). Both girls placed among the top three finishers for their team in every event.

“Where do we go from here?” Cerchio said. “We just want to keep increasing our scores and doing the best we can.”

Bryan said: “We came out with an all right score considering we had a lot of falls. … [But] overall, we really need to work on execution and focusing in on each event. … The difficulty is always there, [the challenge is] staying in the zone.”


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