AZUSA, Calif. -- Even though the total scores left room for improvement, Azusa Pacific's Thursday night tri-meet with Hawai'i Pacific and Fairmont State was the sport of acrobatics and tumbling at its best as the Cougars went back and forth all evening long with third-ranked Hawai'i Pacific before edging the Sharks in the team event to win by a margin of sixteen-hundredths of a point.
Azusa Pacific scored 96.06 points in the team event, while Hawai'i Pacific registered 94.45 points, leaving just enough room for the Cougars to surge ahead at the very end in front of an energetic Felix Event Center crowd of 873.
"The energy the team got from the crowd just before the team event really changed their mental state," Azusa Pacific head coach Colleen Kausrud said. "It seemed like that helped them focus and push themselves a little harder to step up and do what they needed to do at the end."
With a final score of 271.46 points, Azusa Pacific avenged a season-opening home loss to Hawai'i Pacific, which finished with a score of 271.30. Fairmont State was within striking distance through the first four events of the meet but fell off the pace in tumbling and the team event, finishing with 261.18 points.
The margin of victory is tied for the closest in Azusa Pacific's program history, matching anApril 2, 2012 road win over Quinnipiac, and it propelled the Cougars to a 5-2 overall record with one regular-season meet remaining. The win also wraps up a busy stretch which found Azusa Pacific going 5-1 while competing in four meets across three time zones in a span of just 10 days.
"We have had so many different things coming at us from how many meets we've had to coming back from Tuesday's loss," Kausrud said. "To do as well as we did on Tuesday without a couple of key contributors was encouraging, and knowing that there were things we could have corrected that would have helped us win that meet seemed to light a fire under the team to prove that they can beat anybody."
Hawai'i Pacific won the compulsory event to take the early lead, but Azusa Pacific answered by posting three identical scores of 9.65 in each heat of the acro event to edge ahead of HPU by a margin of five-hundredths of a point. The Sharks were nearly-perfect in the pyramid event, posting two scores of 9.95 along with a 9.80, which pushed Hawai'i Pacific back in front at halftime by a margin of four-tenths of a point.
Fairmont State closed the gap on the meet leaders by winning the toss event before Hawai'i Pacific padded its lead by winning the tumbling event with its final two solo tumbling passes each scoring 9.575 or better. Azusa Pacific freshman Kimi Yee scored a tumbling team-high 9.50 in her aerial solo pass, and senior Jamie Montgomery finished off tumbling with a score of 9.325 in the open solo pass.
However, HPU scored the best in four of the six tumbling heats to take a lead of 1.45 points over the Cougars before the meet was decided by the team event performances.
"It's a team effort, but we had individuals who kept the energy up on the team and really helped get others on the team to step up in the areas we needed," Kausrud said. "It's a process of continual learning and forward progress. We can't afford to let ourselves take steps backwards, and we want to keep challenging ourselves with higher start values because it's so important mentally for the team to keep pushing themselves."
Azusa Pacific wraps up the regular season on Monday, April 4, hosting four-time NCATA national champion University of Oregon.
