CLEVELAND | A day after the Alabama gymnastics team won its fifth national championship, junior Geralen Stack-Eaton took home the individual floor exercise national championship at the Wolstein Center in Cleveland Sunday afternoon.
Stack-Eaton posted an amazing score of 9.9375 to take the floor title, the highest score on any event during individuals, and became the first Crimson Tide gymnast to bring home an individual championship since Morgan Dennis won the floor exercise as a freshman in 2007.
Stack-Eaton’s name will now be painted on the Tide’s practice gym with all the other individual national champions in school history.
“I always look up there,” Stack-Eaton said. “Now I can be up there with Morgan and all the other greats.”
Alabama performed nine routines from six different gymnasts Sunday. The Tide’s competitors included Stack-Eaton (floor, vault and bars), Kayla Hoffman (beam and vault), Ashley Sledge (vault), Marissa Gutierrez (vault), Kim Jacob (beam) and Sarah DeMeo (bars).
Stack-Eaton started her night by falling on bars, but she came back to finish eighth on vault before winning the floor title.
“I was just tired,” Stack-Eaton said. “I didn’t get much sleep last night [after winning the team national title]. I conserved my energy just enough to have enough juice at the end.”
Hoffman finished fourth on vault before tying for second on beam, nearly winning the title. Her 9.8875 stood as the top score on beam for most of the event before UCLA’s Sam Peszek posted a 9.9.
“I thought that was the best beam Kayla has done,” Patterson said. “She was as relaxed up there as I’ve ever seen her.”
DeMeo finished in a tie for third on bars, Jacob finished tied for eighth on beam and Gutierrez and Sledge finished fifth and seventh on vault, respectively.