Day belongs to Dawgs

The University of Utah's gymnastics team got most of what it wanted out of Monday night's battle of the unbeatens with No. 1-ranked Georgia.

The meet came down to the final competitor, Gritt Hofmann's wildly popular floor routine, and she thought she had done enough to nail down the win.

"I just knew I had to hit it. I knew it was close," Hofmann said.

She did hit, but her score was 9.90, and she actually needed 9.925 to tie the team scores, so Georgia, the defending NCAA champion, went on to its 13th straight victory of the season, 197.10-197.075 for the now-9-1 Utes in the Huntsman Center before a season-high 13,809.

"I hate losing to them," said Ute junior co-captain Nicolle Ford, who has now lost two seasons in a row to the Gym Dogs since the two teams resumed their regular-season series last year for the first time since 1991.

Yet the process in this case was probably the important thing.

"It doesn't get any better," said Utah coach Greg Marsden, whose wife and associate coach Megan Marsden quickly corrected him, that it could have been better with a win.

But for a team that has struggled to put together a complete meet most of this season, despite being 9-0 going into the meet, Georgia provided the challenge for the Utes to pretty much show their best.

There was one fall on beam, and Ford, trying a new tumbling pass at the end of her routine, went almost to her knees and scored 9.6.

But the Utes counted no really poor scores, as they have had to do most of the season, even though they were unbeaten, and they led for three events despite actually losing because they didn't stick landings on their first event, vault.

And Marsden was simply happy Ford got through the new double-pike pass at the end of her routine for the first time because she'd had trepidations about doing it until he told her she needed it to be competitive at the NCAA championships in April. "That's all it took," he said, for her to begin working on it just two weeks ago.

Both teams came out of the meet with a renewed sense of confidence.