Dean leads gymnastics team to third straight county title
By Harry Thomas
Correspondent
The Bishop Ahr High School gymnastics team didn’t have an easy time winning the Greater Middlesex Conference Championship Oct. 21 in Old Bridge. But the fact that the Trojans won with less than their best performance says something about just how good a team they have.
Bishop Ahr won its third consecutive county title, and eighth overall, with 107.7 points, its lowest since a Sept. 23 dual meet, edging runner-up East Brunswick and third-place Old Bridge.
Going into the fourth and final rotation, Bishop Ahr’s lead was slim.
“The other teams had great nights and we knew it was close,” Bishop Ahr head coach Brant Lutska said. “We really weren’t sure where we stood throughout this whole thing. We just didn’t have the night we thought we were going to have. We had a lot of errors that we could have cleaned up, but we also had some great performances. Jill Dean all-around had a phenomenal meet.”
Dean, a junior, was the star for Bishop Ahr. She scored a 37.050 to claim her second individual title in three years.
D e a n overcame one obstacle to win. In the middle of her floor exercise, her accompanying music stopped playing, exactly as it had for her teammate Ashley Ann Chosney a few minutes earlier.“I was a little nervous when the music went off, but I had it in my head that it might,” said Dean. “I was anticipating it and I was mentally prepared. I knew what I had to do, so it didn’t faze me that much.”
Dean rallied from the distraction to win with a 9.325. She also placed second in the beam and bars.
In total, Bishop Ahr took home eight medals, East Brunswick won seven and Old Bridge claimed five.
“We were very aware,” Dean said of the tight team race. “We had a lot of mistakes tonight and counted a lot of falls. It’s a wake-up call because we know we can do better than this. We’ve scored four points higher. We definitely have it in us. We just didn’t all hit tonight, so it was a little disappointing. But we were happy with the end result.”
Bishop Ahr suffered four major errors that resulted in two missed points. But the Trojans still earned eight medals. The Trojans will try to improve their performance when they begin defense of their state title at the NJSIAA sectional championships Nov. 6.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law