Three gymnasts to have ‘home crowd’ on the road at NIU
Central Michigan gymnastics might have more fans this week than host Northern Illinois.
Those Chippewa fans won’t be CMU students or traitorous Northern Illinois fans. They will be family and friends of three Illinois-native Chippewas.
Senior Emily Heinz, and juniors Becca Druien and Tori Garcia all live within an hour of Northern Illinois and each are looking forward to being close to home for Sunday’s meet.
“I’ll have about 30 family members there,” Heinz said. “So that’s pretty exciting.”
Druien and Garcia said they have family and friends coming from home to watch.
Incidentally, both were considering going to school at NIU before ultimately choosing CMU.
“Two of my coaches that I had in club coach there, so it was a big school that I was looking at,” Druien said. “Personally, I just want to show them how much I’ve grown and how much better I’ve gotten.”
Garcia was out of the lineup last week, but has been fighting to compete on vault.
Head coach Jerry Reighard said she always performs better against NIU.
“When I want a great vault from her, I always tell her we’re at Northern Illinois,” Reighard said. “She has time and again produced really well at that meet.”
NIU doesn’t pose much of a threat statistically. The Huskies best score this year is a 193.825, a number the Chippewas have eclipsed in all nine meets this year.
NIU’s all-time record is a 195.65 in 2003.
“Going into this meet, we don’t have any doubts that we’re going to win,” Heinz said. “We’re not going to overlook them, obviously, because they could have their best meet of their life, since every other team seems to do that (against us). We just have to be on our A-game.”
With the Mid-American Conference title out of reach after a loss to Kent State, a strong score is a higher priority than a victory.
“This meet is much more than a win or a loss for us,” Reighard said. “I just presented a mathematical formula to the team, (and) we can jump close to the top 12 if we do our job.”
CMU could jump up as high as two tenths of a point in the Regional Qualifying Score, which is how teams are ranked.
Numbers 12 through 16 in the national rankings are separated by less than .13 of a point.
“What our team needs to get is a little grandma grit top to bottom,” Reighard said. “Our No. 1 ingredient that’s going to allow us to get the scores that we want is we need to stick vaults and dismounts.”
With the team holding the fourth through sixth best scores in the CMU record books, Garcia believes there are no boundaries.
“I don’t think there is a ceiling, I think we’re unstoppable,” she said. “We’re not going to be satisfied until everyone puts their best all in the same meet and that hasn’t happened yet. I know it’s 197 plus. We’re hoping to break the school record, so that’s our goal.”
