Carey Fagan Team Quotations

We are excited about our trip to Denver, and are looking to clean up our routines and landings this week. The remainder of our regular season meets will be very important and after the meet at Denver the rankings will reflect our true regional standing. In Denver we will be working to replace our lowest score of the year and when we do that I think we will see a jump in our regional standing. Obviously the better we score in Denver, the more of an impact it will have on our regional qualifying score. Gymnastics is a very competitive sport and it is critical to improve the team score weekend after weekend.

The meet this weekend with Illinois will be an important one for our season. It is our senior meet and our last home competition of the year. This group of seniors is very special to me. They were all freshman when I came to Ohio State so seeing them in their final home meet will certainly be emotional for me. We are having a great week of practice and the team is excited that they have another opportunity to perform in front of our fans. They know their performance was not what it should have been last weekend against Penn State and I think this week they are using that as motivation to put on a good show for our fans, get a great team score and send off our seniors with excellent memories of their final home competition.

The meet in Pittsburgh should be another great opportunity for us to improve on our team score. Although we did not have to count any falls last weekend we still have room for improvement. This team has really matured during the first half of the season. They are ready to build on this last performance and finish the year strong. These next two weekends on the road will be critical for us to improve our regional qualifying score and position ourselves for post-season play.

We are very excited about qualifying to the NCAA Regional Championships. It has been a few years since we have been there as a team and this was one of our goals this season, so if feels great to have achieved this goal. Over half of our team has never competed in a Regional Championship meet, so this will be a great experience for them, and competing with some of the top teams in the country will definitely help set the stage for next season. Anything can happen on any given night. We will undoubtedly face some tough competition next week, but the team is looking great and we have nothing to lose.

I was excited with our win over Illinois tonight. This is the first time we have beat a team ahead of us in the rankings. The scores tonight were tight and I think we performed better than last week even if the scores were lower. I am happy with the win.

It wasn't a perfect night but we certainly have positioned ourselves into a best-case scenario to be fifth or sixth in the region when the new standings come out, which is much better than last year. I feel like the team is on a roll right now going into the championship portion of the season. We're anxious to get home the next two weeks and then take it into the Big Ten championship.

It was disappointing to lose to Pittsburgh tonight. We were sloppy tonight and didn't have the clean landings like we did at West Virginia, so those tenths added up in the team score. We always want to see the team constantly improve but there were no major mistakes. We just need to get the routines cleaner and move on to Denver next week.

I was really pleased with the team's performance against Illinois last weekend. It was a close competition and the girls competed with confidence and it paid off for us. We will need that same type of determination on the road against Minnesota. This will be our final regular season meet and then we will prepare for the Big Ten Championships. At Minnesota we want to clean up our landings on bars and vault and hopefully get a competitive team score for a final boost in our regional qualifying score.

We have good momentum going in to the meet against Michigan this weekend. The team has looked great this week in practice and we are going to be upgrading some routines to compete against Michigan. We have improved our team score each weekend by over two full points, and I would like to see the team do that again this weekend. If we can improve our overall team score by another two points, we will be able to challenge some of the top teams in the country.

We improved our team score tonight and the balance beam was much better. It was a difficult loss. It felt like we have the ability to be like Michigan State. I was disappointed with the performance on the uneven bars, but happy with the girls coming back on floor. They did a great performance on floor.