After its season opener on Jan. 15, the Blugold women’s gymnastics team has competed twice, but has come up short both times. Their second loss of the season came from the UW-La Crosse Eagles on Friday.

The Eau Claire gymnasts traveled to La Crosse for a matchup against their gymnastics team. With a final score of 173.425-185.700, the Blugolds lost the meet despite some stellar individual performances.

It was a night of career-bests for freshmen Rachel Behmer and Danielle Schulzetenberg. Behmer was the highest finishing Blugold of the night with an uneven bars routine totaling a career-best 9.300, earning her first place. Schulzetenberg tied for second on the balance beam with a 9.400 and also scored a career-best 9.250 for the floor exercise, which was the top score for Eau Claire in that event.

Behmer said the coaches told the team to have fun at the meet last night, and that’s exactly what she did.

On the vault, junior Sarah Hulbert’s routine won her a 9.275, but despite being the Blugold’s highest score on the vault, it only placed her in fourth. Schulzetenberg finished the night with fifth place on the floor and said the uneven bars rotation got everyone fired up and continued onward and upward through their balance beam routines. She said that the team has a lot of spirit and that was fun to see.

Schulzetenberg also said she expects the Blugolds to improve with more events.

“We have a really close team and we don’t want to peak too early,” Schulzetenberg said. “Our routines are coming together and everyone’s getting better as the season’s going on.”

Both Schulzetenberg and Hulbert attribute the lackluster overall scores to the stress of a new semester and the lack of rest.

“We had a kind of frustrating week in the gym,” Schulzetenberg said. “Practice was going slow and people were tired and trying to get back into the habit of studying and going to practice at the same time.”

Eau Claire falls to 1-3 overall and will compete again next Friday evening as the Blugold gymnastics team heads back to Mitchell Hall in La Crosse for the Gershon/McLellan Invite against UW-La Crosse and UW-Oshkosh. The Blugolds will also face the Eagles again on Feb. 12 when they travel to UW-Stout for the John Zuerlien Invite.

Schulzetenberg said that she’s excited to go back to La Crosse and expects the team will do better next time.

“We’ve already been on the equipment and there will be more people and more fans there. We can improve a ton with another week of practice to get everything down,” Schulzetenberg said.

“La Crosse is everyone’s biggest rival because they’ve been the national champs,” Hulbert said. “We actually have gone against the top three teams that qualified for nationals last year, so we’ve pretty much competed again the best three teams. Our team’s scores have been a lot higher this year than they were last year.”