Azusa Pacific’s Acrobatics and Tumbling team looks ahead after a lot of improvements over the offseason and a successful season-opening meet at Hawai’i Pacific on Friday, Feb. 21. Courtesy: APU Sports Information
With the 2013 National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association Coach of the Year Colleen Kausrud at the helm, the Azusa Pacific Cougars beat the Hawai’i Pacific Sea Warriors Friday, Feb. 21 on their home turf by a wide gap of 13.34 points, marking many aspects of growth for APU this season.
This is HPU’s first season competing in the NCATA, but Kausrud said the Cougars were not expecting anything less than tough competition from the new team.
“They had a really strong competitive cheer program, and they decided to take on acro and tumbling,” Kausrud said before the meet. “So they are going to have a lot of talent, whether it be tumblers – their program was known for having a lot of talent in the tumbling area – and definitely in the acro area just because of that cheer background. They will be a very good competing team to beat, so we’re not taking them lightly, that’s for sure.”
Looking at APU’s team this year, the biggest differences from previous seasons are more tumbling talent and a larger percentage of veterans, said Kausrud. In the past, tumbling was a weak point for the Cougars.
“The whole tumbling event should be a totally different story for us,” Kausrud said. “It’s always affected our team event score and obviously our tumbling score, and that’s where we started to lose. … We are excited to be able to have starting values that are competitive with the DI schools, and I think we can hold our own against them, so that’s exciting.”
Kausrud said along with maxing out all the tumbling start values to 10, her goal for the team this season is for the women to be confident.
“Well, I keep telling my girls this sport is 90 percent mental and only 10 percent skill. Most of them have the skills coming in, and they have to have the confidence when they take the mat, and that’s a process we’re really stressing this season,” Kausrud said.
New to the team, sophomore base Melanie Thomas competed in four out of the six events, including tumbling in the duo pass, basing pyramids and competing in the team routine. She said the squad’s confidence went up after the win.
“I feel like coming out of the meet, everyone was really positive and felt really energized and really determined and focused to go into the next meet, which is at Oregon,” Thomas said. “I feel like everyone is going to take practice really seriously for the next couple weeks until we go to Oregon, and we’re going to put up a really good fight there.”
After falling behind in the first competition, the compulsory event, by two-tenths of a point, the Cougars continued to pull ahead and beat the Sea Warriors in every event following. They beat HPU in the last event, the team routine, by almost 10 points.
Friday night, the Cougars beat all of their tumbling event scores from the 2013 season with a final event score of 56.725. The last three passes of the event were within two-tenths of a perfect score.
Senior top Jessica Laughton, described by Kausrud as a potential NCATA All-American, and sophomore base/back Jamie Montgomery delivered the last two individual tumbling passes of the event. They had scores of 9.9 in the six-element pass and 9.85 in the open pass, respectively.
Laughton, who acted as both a tumbler and a top throughout the meet, said her goal for her senior year is to win the NCATA championships this season.
“We’ve all just kind of been able to work together and feed each other’s energy and work off of each other and just support each other 100 percent throughout the meet and practices and everything,” Laughton said.
After not being able to land her pass in practice last season, she landed her open pass in Friday’s competition. Montgomery threw a front handspring, front layout, half-double back handspring through to a full and landed it.
“It felt amazing, especially coming from last season where the pass wasn’t as confident, this season I was super-confident in that pass and it felt really good that it was going to be strong,” Montgomery said.
With no air conditioning during the meet, the heat of the competition and temperature in the gymnasium were high for the competing teams.
“I think I was most impressed with the fact that it was so hot, and it was in a small gymnasium, and even under the weather conditions we weren’t used to, everyone pulled together really well and kept the energy levels super-high throughout the meet and just performed really really well,” Thomas said.
After the meet, Kausrud said that HPU is still a team to respect. Once the Sea Warriors tighten up their team routine, they will still be a competitive force, she said. As for the Cougars, Kausrud said she hopes to clean up the rest of the skills before the next competition.
“We have to work on steps, staying super-tight and working on all the little small things now because we know we can hit everything, so now it’s just making it perfect,” Montgomery said.
According to Laughton, the win gave the women the attitude to want to be ready to go against Oregon at the next competition.
“It just starts us off on the right foot, and I think we are all just so pumped and ready to take on Oregon in a few weeks,” Laughton said. “I think it will definitely be a challenge, but we’ve all been working so hard and know what we have to work on even more now, and so practices should be really productive from now on, and we’re just excited for Oregon.”
With a final score of 268.795 to 255.455, the Cougars delivered their first win of the season. Azusa Pacific will travel to Oregon on Monday, March 10 in a three-team competition against three-peat National Champions the Oregon Ducks and the Quinnipiac Bobcats.