Gymnasts set high expectation for the season with near-record-breaking score
This past weekend, Yale gymnastics earned fourth place out of five teams in the Lindsey Ferris Invitational, setting the team’s second-highest season opener score in history.
Yale Athletics
After many practices in the preseason, Yale gymnastics competed in their season opener on Sunday, Jan. 14, receiving an optimistic team score of 193.3250 ahead of their one-on-one competitions versus Ivy teams.
The team, which boasts five new first-year athletes, ranked third in the Gymnastics East Conference preseason poll. These projections place Yale behind the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University, although they won second place in the GEC last season. Throughout the season the Bulldogs will fight to score well both as a team and in the individual events at the Ivy Classic, the GEC Championship and the NCAA Regionals and Nationals.
At the Charles E. Smith Center in Washington, D.C. last Sunday, the Bulldogs took to the competition floor for the first time in their 2023-24 season, competing against Penn, George Washington University, Cornell University and Temple University.
In addition to the entire team’s first meet of the season, the event was three first-years’ — Lily Aucoin ’27, Chloe DeJoy ’27, and Ella Tashjian ’27 — debut on the collegiate competition floor. Aucoin and DeJoy both competed on the uneven bars, while Tashjian took the lead amongst the Bulldogs on floor, with a whopping 9.8250.
Tashjian is also on the list for CollegeGymNews’ “most anticipated on vault,” with her clean yurchenko 1.5 twist stuck landing.
Yale gymnastics veterans Gigi Sabatini ’26 and Emma Mangiacapre ’24 both scored the highest for the team on vault and beam, respectively. The two tied on the balance beam with a 9.8520. Additionally, Sabatini took home an all-around gold for the team with a high score of 38.8250.
Sabatini was one of eleven gymnasts on the team that received the Women’s Collegiate Gymnastics Association Scholastic All-American Honors for the 2022-23 season. The award is only given to student-athletes with a GPA of 3.5 or higher for the academic year, of which Yale had many.
Ahead of their first home meet of the season in two weeks, the gymnasts will make their way to Brooklyn, New York, this weekend for a quad-meet versus Long Island University, New Hampshire and Southern Connecticut. Last January, the Bulldogs fell to LIU by just over four points.
The inaugural GEC competitive season was in 2022.