Utah Utes gymnastics notebook: Marsdens take blame for U. gymnast's score

Utah gymnastics co-coaches Greg and Megan Marsden gave junior Stephanie McAllister permission to yell at them this week.

She didn't do it.

She didn't let the reason that gave her that rare permission bother her at all. As always.

"Stephanie? No," said Greg Marsden. "We were very apologetic to her, but that's not Steph, to lose sleep over that kind of thing."

McAllister, who was the nation's No. 5 all-arounder last week, received a 0.2 deduction in Saturday's 196.60-196.325 loss at No. 5 Oregon State in her floor exercise. The deduction was because the two judges at that meet noted that she did not have a proper combination of a leap off of one foot into a 180-degree split combined with another leap or jump.

The coaches thought her routine had met the requirement, and no other judges through Utah's first nine meets had deducted her for the skills the way she did them.

"These judges pointed out that this technically didn't meet the letter of the rule, and so they started her at a 9.8," said Greg Marsden.

"It's not going to be hard to fix at all," said Megan Marsden, "but it is the mistake of we coaches not understanding the rule perfectly. We can't interact with judges, so it's up to us in meets to have judges catch stuff like that, and nobody's told us anything on leaps until this."

Megan took the blame and said it's the coaches' jobs to know all the nuances of the rules.

Though the deduction wouldn't have changed the team outcome, Megan said she felt bad that the deduction hurt McAllister's all-around score by 0.2, and that's probably how she dropped a bit in this week's rankings.

"No. It was just a mistake," said McAllister with that cheerful smile that got her nicknamed "Happy." "We just had all made a mistake."

While she didn't know why her score was low but saw the coaches conferring with the officials about it, she said it didn't bother her on beam. "I would say it didn't affect my beam at all," she said. She scored 9.85 on that last event to go with a 9.85 on bars and 9.80 on vault. She got 9.60 with the -0.2 on floor, so she'd have totaled 39.30 without the deduction.