NCAA Gymnastics Preview_ Corrie Lothrop of Utah

The NCAA Women's Gymnastics Championships will be underway starting Friday from Gwinnett, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, and though the seventh-ranked Utah Utes may seem like a slight long-shot, the team has been known to perform well under pressure thanks to the guidance of co-coach Greg Marsden.

One of the gymnasts to watch from the Utes squad is Corrie Lothrop, a sophomore from Donvers, Mass., who was named PAC-12 Gymnast of the week on Feb. 7 for her outstanding 39.475 all-around score, which included a 9.9 on the balance beam, in a win over Georgia.

Lothrop was also named to the first team all-around team for the PAC-12 Conference, along with her teammate Stephanie McAllister. Lothrop was also named Honorable Mention for the PAC-12 All-Academic Team.

Sports Desk- Utah Edges Stanford in Women's Gymnastics

Senior Kyndal Robarts scored individual victories on the vault beam helping the Utes win its home meet over Pac-12 rival Stanford 196.3-196.1. Robarts had a career-high 9.975 on vault, a 9.875 on beam and a 9.80 on floor.

Robarts was also awarded with the Special Performance of the Week for the Pac-12 Conference; she became the third Utes awarded with that title this season.

Her teammates senior Cortni Beers and sophomore Corrie Lothrop are the other Utes gymnast who won the honor.

In a vastly different part of the country in Ithaca, NY, on the campus of Cornell University, the home team Big Red finished second to the Penn Quakers at the Ivy League classic over the weekend. The other two Ivy schools with women's gymnastics programs Brown and Yale, finished third and fourth respectively.

Tiffany Chen of Cornell won the Ivy title on vault. The Big red scored a 191.85, the team's highest score of the year.

For the Quakers, senior Laura DiPaolo helped pave the way to victory with a 9.725 on vault, and her freshman teammate Amber Woo scored a 9.725 on beam.

The scores for the visiting teams were: Penn (192.65), Brown (191.075) and Yale (190.725).

Congrats to Alabama Crimson Tide Gymnastics

The University of Alabama won their fifth women's gymnastics championship on Saturday in Cleveland thanks to the efforts of Kayla Hoffman (pictured here on floor) and Geralen Stack-Eaton (pictured here talking to Coach Sarah Patterson).

Kylee Botterman (whew!, we almost typed her name with one e!) of Michigan won all-around with a 39.525 as she edged out Hoffman from Alabama (39.5).

For the Crimson Tide, Stack-Eaton won the individual floor exercise event with a 9.937. Other individual winners included Marissa King of Florida who won vault with a 9.875; Kat Ding of Georgia who scored a 9.875 to win uneven bars and Sam Peszek of UCLA who won the balance beam with a 9.9 score.

Other teams had gymnasts who fared well including the Utes who finished fifth overall, but the team had stand-out performances from veteran gymnasts Gael Mackie and Stephanie McAllister.

SIDEBAR: Today was a good day for Geoffrey Mutai as the Kenyan runner finished the Boston Marathon in record time with a score of 2:03:02. His fellow Kenyan Moses Mosop finished second. And, Ethiopian runner Gebregziabher Gebermariam, who will qualify for our top ten list of impossible names (which we hoping to post one week from today) finished in third. Of course, we fully realized that we probably will have to apologize for not spelling his name right!

Stack-Eaton also won the floor exercise event with a 9.937 score.

Sunday Sports Desk

All the talk in this part of the country, well between Maryland and South Carolina, has been on the Duke-UNC game in Chapel Hill last night in which the UNC Tarheels defeated the Duke Bluedevils 81-67.

But, we wanted to congratulate the UNC-Asheville Bulldogs for winning the Big South championship over Coastal Carolina University by a 60-47 score in Conway, SC (Myrtle Beach) yesterday.

My alma mater Radford University and my mom's alma mater Winthrop University are also Big South teams, so I always hope they do well in the NCAA tourney, as Winthrop did a few years back. Of course, it would be nice if Radford could win the tourney every year!

We also like to keep tabs on Turkish soccer (my late father was from Turkey) even though I haven't watched a game in two years. This weekend, the scores were as follows: Manisa 2 Kayseri 1; Ankaragucu 2 Konya 0; Gaziantep 3 Sivas 1; Eskisehir 1 Bucaspor 0; Bursaspor 1 Istanbul BB 1 (tie); GalataSaray (Istanbul) 0 KDCK 0 (tie); Trabzonspor 2 Besiktash (Istanbul) 1.

For more info, on the games, you can check out Ahmet Bob Turgut's Twitter feed at (twitter.com/turkish soccer).

Lastly, our very favorite sport is women's collegiate gymnastics and there were many meets of interest this weekend.

Due to space and time constraints, we will focus on just two of them.

For starters, Florida (#1) edged Utah (#5) in Salt Lake City thanks to stand-out performances from Gator gymnasts Alaina Johnson, Marissa King and Mackenzie Caquatta.

But, for the home team Utes, Fumina Kobayashi and Cortni Beers finished in a three-way tie for first place on the balance beam with Ashanne Dickerson of Florida, who also scored a 9.9 on vault.


And, our home state North Carolina State Wolfpack gymnastics team won a key road meet over Pittsburgh today thanks to a stand-out performance from Jess Panza, who scored a 9.925 on the balance beam. Panza's score was the highest single event score for a Wolfpack gymnast this season.

The image above, by the way, is of the late, great Howard Cosell (1918-1995) who would have perhaps been horrified to find out that in 2011, due to modern technology, there are many more things to do on a Monday night than watch NFL football on tv. In fact, if one desires, they can play World of the Witchcraft with their 'friends' in Australia for 48 hours in a row.

Yeah, I think that's a bad idea too, but those guys (well, I suppose women can get addicted to WOTWC too) do make us bloggers appear to be people who have real lives.

Road Trip USA (1 of 20)_ A Night at the Opera

While we were listening to WVTF, the NPR station in Roanoke, Va., yesterday, I thought it was interesting that we heard the last minutes of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," which was being broadcast from Spartanburg, SC. Then, the next NPR show that aired was a live broadcast of the contemporary opera "Nixon in China," by the New York Met Opera.

All of this made me wonder how long it would take to get from Wade's Family Restaurant in Spartanburg (a city that is relatively close to Clemson University), which was mentioned in "Wait, Wait..." to the famed opera house (the opera pictured here is actually one of my favorites "Rigoletto.")

And, you get to take a guess here as to that answer...

Is it?:

a)10 hours and 17 minutes
b) 11 hours and 49 minutes
c) 12 hours and 28 minutes
d) 13 hours and 42 minutes

You would actually go through Roanoke while taking this trip!

SIDEBAR: Since I am a huge college gymnastics fan, I thought it would be interesting to mention that long-time powerhouse The University of Utah will be hosting Michigan on Friday. And, the Utes have a very unique promotion called Short Person Appreciation Night. Anyone who is under five feet tall gets in free! Today, happens to be the 19th birthday of sophomore Fumina Kobayashi of the Utes who is 5'2. Her teammate Nansy Damianova, a Canadian freshman from Montreal who speaks Bulgarian (?!), is 5'1.