Milan Clausi of Cal W. Gymnastics earns 9.825 on vault at NCAA championships

FRIDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE:

Milan lands her vault and earned a 9.825 score (they are judged rather tightly in today’s NCAA semifinal).

Solid way for the Cal freshman to end her first collegiate season.

ROLL ON YOU BEARS!

With a vault of 9.95 at the NCAA Athens Regional (embedded below), Milan Clausi earned a trip to Forth Worth this weekend to participate in the NCAA Championships.

Although the tremendous team effort by Cal Women’s Gymnastics fell short because they were in the “Regional of Death” with top ranked Oklahoma and host Georgia (Cal’s final team score of 197.675 would have been 4th highest across all the Regionals - if the Bears were in any of the other three regionals, the team would be in Fort Worth right now), Cal will once again have at least one gymnast at the NCAA Championships.

Solely determined today in the NCAA semifinals, the individual champion will be crowned with the top 4 finishers (including ties) earning 1st team All-American honors. Places 5th through 8th would earn 2nd team All-American honors. Cal women’s gymnastics has yet to win a NCAA individual championship in program history.

Milan Clausi, who won the Pac-12 Freshman of the Year honor, has been quite clutch on her vaults - hitting on all of them. With a starting value of 10.0 (so a perfect 10 is always plausible), Clausi has earned 9.90 or 9.95 on her last 4 vaults, including the Pac-12 Championships and the NCAA Regional. The daughter of former Utah and Team USA Gymnastics great, Missy Marlowe, Cal fans would love for Clausi to eventually match her mother’s feat of earning 10.0 across all four apparatus in a single season.

Because she is one of the six finalists for the AAI Award, Cal senior Toni-Ann Williams who is also Milan Clausi’s mentor and close friend, will be there to cheer on her prodigy. Williams also made the NCAA as a vault specialist in her freshman year.

You should read more about that special relationship between Toni-Ann Williams and Milan Clausi in this nice feature story below.

Milan Clausi will be do her vault with the LSU Tigers at the end of the LSU’s vault rotation (3rd rotation) in session 1 today. Session 1 starts at 10 AM PT and is streamed on ESPN3.

GO MILAN AND GO BEARS!