Gymnastics Kicks off 2022 Season with Sunday Quad Meet

Sunday, January 9

New Haven, Conn.

1:00 pm

Brown University

188.700

190.825

LIU

Photo by: Stew Milne

Gymnastics Kicks off 2022 Season with Sunday Quad Meet

1/9/2022 6:42:00 PM | Women's Gymnastics

Complete Results

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – After much anticipation, the Brown gymnastics team kicked off its 2022 season on Sunday afternoon with a quad meet at Yale. Senior Mei Li Costa led the Bears in two events, tying for third on the beam and tying for seventh on vault. Senior Sophia Petrillo led the way for Brown on the uneven bars and sophomore Angela Xing paced Brown on floor. Senior Alyssa Gardner set a new personal-best on bars.

In their first competition in 672 days, the Bears finished with 188.700 points, taking fourth place. West Chester took home the team title with 192.325 points, followed by LIU at 190.825 and the host Bulldogs with 190.800.

"Overall, it was really exciting to see everyone step up and be energized about competing again and embracing the opportunity," said head coach Sara Carver-Milne. "They started out strong and looked calm, confident and in charge and doing what they do in practice. They had a lot of energy and everything went well from the start."

The Bears started off the meet on the bars first, and were led by a pair of seniors with Petrillo leading the way, tying for eighth out of 24 with 9.700 points. Gardner led off the event for Brown and tied her own personal best with a score of 9.675 points, tying her for 10th overall. Brown also received contributions from McKenna Weiner (9.625) and Lauren Lazaro (9.450) who made their collegiate debuts, all helping Brown achieve its highest score of the meet.

"Alyssa took her whole senior year off last year so she could come back and compete this year, so it was fitting that she started it off for us and she nailed her routine and got one of her best scores," said Carver-Milne. "She put our team in the right mindset and energy level for a competition. She made sure we started off with a strong routine to get everyone excited and get the energy level up, which gave us some momentum to go from.

"McKenna hasn't competed for us before and she led us off on two events and went second on bars," Carver-Milne said. "She handled the pressure of competition very well and I think she'll surprise a lot of people throughout the season."

Costa led the Bears on the beam with 9.800 points, tying her for third place. Freshman Taylor Schulze turned in a solid performance as well, tying for fifth overall in her collegiate debut with 9.750 points.

"Overall we were solid on beam, but had some first meet jitters," Carver-Milne said. "In that setting, it can be pretty tough to calm your nerves, which we expected. But Taylor was our third person up and she got a 9.75 which got us right back on track. She has only been able to train for a week for this meet and earned our second highest score. She stepped up big for us.

"Mei came out in her first meet and earned one of her highest scores on beam," Carver-Milne said. "She handled it like a veteran and had our highest score on that event."

Costa also led the team in the vault, tying for seventh with a score of 9.725.

"We did not have a lot of depth on vault today," Carver-Milne said. "We only competed five on vault and they looked confident and strong and had some good performances there, just not our top difficulty yet. They stepped up."

The Bears were led on floor by Xing, who placed seventh out of 23 with 9.625 points. Gardner also placed in the top 10 with a ninth place finish with 9.575 points.

"On floor, most of our girls were debuting new routines," Carver-Milne said. "It was not our best performance but we can see the potential today and know that we'll be a strong force on that as well. We watered down our difficulty a little bit, which affects the start value, but they performed them well and we can see we'll have a strong floor team."

Next up, Brown will head back to the Elm City next Saturday for a tri-meet at Southern Connecticut State with SCSU and Bridgeport at 2 p.m.

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