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ASU gymnastics suffers disappointing finish in final home meet

An emotional senior night for Beka Conrad ended in defeat for the Sun Devils

ASU senior Beka Conrad performs on the beam in a gymnastics meet against Stanford at the Wells Fargo Arena in Tempe, Ariz. on Saturday Feb. 18, 2017. Stanford posted a 195.200 - 195.775 victory over ASU.
ASU senior Beka Conrad performs on the beam in a gymnastics meet against Stanford at the Wells Fargo Arena in Tempe, Ariz. on Saturday Feb. 18, 2017. Stanford posted a 195.200 - 195.775 victory over ASU.

ASU gymnastics ended its final home meet of the season with a disappointing third place finish on Friday night in Tempe. 

An overall score of 194.925 put the Sun Devils in last place behind both Sacramento State University and University of Bridgeport, respectively, on an emotional senior night. ASU's lone senior Beka Conrad was honored before the meet in what was her last time competing at Wells Fargo Arena as a Sun Devil.

Conrad finished the night with a 9.625 on beam, which admittedly wasn't one of her better performances. She said she had to balance her emotions mentally before she could balance physically on the beam.

"I started to think to myself 'this is the last time I will be in Wells Fargo Arena,'" Conrad said. "I had to say 'no Beka, don't think about that right now.'"

But it was not for a lack of effort that ASU didn't pull out the win for its senior. The Sun Devils came out especially strong in their three rotations, where 10 of the 18 individual performances were a 9.8 or better. 

However, ASU struggled down the stretch of its final rotation with two key falls on the floor exercise.

ASU head coach Jay Santos said his young team is still figuring out how to win close results and needs to be more consistent.  

"It's one more thing that we need to figure out, and it's how to close out meets," Santos said. "We were able to do it last week at Arizona, where we were on beam and had to hit beam, and we were able to figure it out."

The Sun Devils were led once again by superb performances from sophomore Katelyn Lentz and junior Nichelle Christopherson

Christopherson scored a 9.875 on beam and a 9.850 on bars. It marks her second consecutive meet of scoring 9.875 or higher on beam. 

Lentz finished with an all-around score of 39.225, and three of her four scores were 9.8 or higher.

With the Sun Devils' regular season schedule now over, ASU looks ahead to the 2017 Pac-12 Championships Mar. 18 in Palo Alto.


Reach the reporter at jaramo12@asu.edu or follow @hor_hay10 on Twitter.

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