Tribe Men Show Well at NCAA Championships

ssistant Coach Pete Walker Earns Regional Coach of the Year

04/06/06 7:37PM

NORMAN, OK - The College of William and Mary’s 10th-ranked men’s gymnastics team turned in a solid team score of 202.025 at the NCAA Championships and finished sixth in the first of two, six-team preliminary sessions Thursday afternoon at the Lloyd Noble Arena on the campus of the University of Oklahoma.

Unfortunately for the College, its team score failed to qualify them for Friday’s team championship round, as only the top three teams from each of the two qualifying sessions move forward. Despite not reaching the team finals, the Tribe’s presence at the prestigious event, its fourth appearance in past five seasons, puts an exclamation point on what was an excellent team effort on the 2006 season. Adding to the excitement for the College was the fact that assistant coach Pete Walker was named as the Eastern Region’s Assistant Coach of the Year by a vote taken by the Collegiate Gymnastics Association. Walker will store this hardware besides the Assistant Coach of the Year Award he earned from ECAC just two weeks prior.

Top-ranked Stanford (215.900), Penn State (220.375) and Iowa (212.425) advanced from the College’s six-team session, while Ohio State (211.700) and Minnesota (206.950) finished fourth and fifth, respectively.

As has been the case for much of his four-year career, returning All-American Ramon Jackson (Orlando, FL) was the College’s leading individual on the afternoon, as he turned in a tremendous meet and qualified for the preliminary round of individual qualifying in the all-around. The achievement is especially notable for the fact that it was the first time this season that he competed in all six events in the same meet and his all-around total of 49.575 placed him 10th overall. Jackson’s afternoon was highlighted in his specialty event, the parallel bars, where he spun to a score of 9.150, which placed him third overall. He also placed in the top 10 on the vault with a score of 9.200 that placed him fifth.

The top three individual scores from each of the two sessions advance to tomorrow’s session action, along with each of the top six teams. The Tribe will be well represented alongside of Jackson, as sophomore David Locke (Natick, MA) advanced on both the floor exercise and vault events. Locke recorded the second-highest score amongst the at-large qualifiers on the floor with a mark of 9.25, while his vault mark of 9.025 was the third-best among the at-large contingent. In what could be considered a relatively large long shot, freshman James Prim (Hendersonville, NC) came through with the performance of his young career on the pommel horse to ad-vance as the third, and final, at-large bid. He score of 8.1 sat 10th overall in what was an extremely difficult day of judging on the event.

As stated previously, the individual event finals will be contested tomorrow evening, starting at 7:00 and will be held in conjunction with the team championships.