[the team] completely picked it up and did absolute-
ly amazing,” said Ruggeri, who missed the 2011
NCAAs because of injury. “I’m ecstatic. I stayed a
fifth year for this purpose. I stayed at Illinois to get
another chance at a national championship, so this
is exactly what I wanted.”
Coincidentally, both Oklahoma and Illinois fin-
ished the season without one of their best gymnasts
from a year ago. Two-time defending pommel
horse champion Alex Naddour left OU last fall after
a falling out with Williams, and Spring made the
decision to drop defending p-bar champ Tyler
Mizoguchi from the team during the season itself.
Both moves, however, seemed to galvanize the
remaining team members from both schools.
“We had so much depth this year, and with what
NCAA CHAMPIONSHIPS
we had we made do,” Ruggeri said. “And we did an
amazing job and it was enough, apparently.”
Penn State did not have enough on this night and
placed third. The Nittany Lions had strong team
totals on four events, but scored under 58 on both
parallel bars and high bar. Israeli Felix Aronovich,
Penn State’s lone entry in the all-around, finished
seventh.
“As it turned out, we had too many missed rou-
tines both days,” said Penn State coach Randy Jep-
son. “We had nine misses both days, and had we
done our job, we could have been right in there to
push the guys to win. But [third] was higher than
everyone expected … We have a lot of guys coming
back, so the future’s bright.”
Same for fourth-place California. Just one year
