Nehring vaults her way to state

MOUNT HOREB — Disappointment. Frustration. Confusion. Those are some of the feelings Sara Nehring experienced this winter during her “journey” — her word to describe it — on the vault. Another meet. Another unsatisfactory score. Why weren’t things clicking? It was all worth it in the end. The senior on the Sauk Prairie gymnastics team nailed her routine at Thursday night’s WIAA Division 2 Mount Horeb Sectional and now she has a whole different set of emotions. She’s headed to Saturday’s WIAA Division 2 individual state meet at Wisconsin Rapids Lincoln High School. “Tonight, I was able to stick it,” Nehring said. “It was a really good feeling.” Nehring, who competed on the floor exercise at state a year ago, took on a new challenge in the vault this season. She had always practiced what’s called a Tsuk twist, but never did it in a meet. Her senior year, though, brought a new mindset. It’s what she wanted to do. “It started out pretty good at the beginning of the season,” she said. “Then I started getting lower scores — not getting as much amplitude, not getting as high. So it got a little hard trying to find the motivation to do it.” That led her to take a break from it at midseason. The frustration reached a boiling point. She needed to clear her head. “She had a couple week period where she couldn’t even flip a vault because she was putting so much pressure on herself to try to get it just right,” Sauk Prairie coach Justine Anderson said. The “rocky” road — again, Nehring’s description of her season in the vault — finally smoothed out on Thursday. All of the work, and the adversity she endured, paid off with her fourth-place score of 8.950 on her first vault, with one judge giving her an 8.80 and the other a 9.10. The top five individuals in each of the four events earned state berths, as well as the top five all-around individuals. Nehring also advanced to state in the uneven bars, taking fifth with an 8.575. The vault, though, was definitely her crowning achievement. Nehring said that the break definitely helped, and that returning for the Badger Conference meet a week prior was definitely the right timing. “Now that the postseason has come, I feel like that fire has kind of relit a little bit,” Nehring said. “Having that much adrenaline and having that much on the line I think helped me get a little higher and land on my feet.” Anderson knew as soon as she saw it that Nehring had finally done what she set out to do at the beginning of the year.   She landed the Tsuk twist. “She made eyes with me like she couldn’t even believe that she did it,” Anderson said. “She knew that it was a good vault. I have chills just talking about it.” Nehring was the Eagles’ torch bearer on Thursday. But she wasn’t alone in having a good meet. Coming off a school-record score of 136.2 while taking second at conference the week before, Sauk Prairie couldn’t quite match that but did turn in a more-than-respectable 134.950 -- good enough for fourth place. Elkhorn won the sectional with a 140.600 team score, while Mount Horeb was second with a 137.900. Monona Grove took third with a 135.350. “They looked as good as they could have today — and as good as I could have hoped. There’s always going to be a mistake here and there, but they were so minimal in comparison to what could have happened,” Anderson said. “So handling the pressure of today, knowing we have one of the toughest sectionals, I thought we did an incredible job.” Anderson added that she knew her team was ready for the scrutiny of the season’s penultimate meet following the very first event of the night — the balance beam. “What stood out to me in general was the attitudes across the board -- it was just calm. And I wasn’t expecting calm,” Anderson said. “We had beam in the first round and sometimes that can go sideways because you still are nervous about competing and you’re starting on an event that requires so much calm.  “And we only had one fall out of five girls on beam. And they just carried a calm energy throughout the entire night. The mental aspect of it was incredible. That was evident in how Nehring did. But also in how her teammates, juniors McKenna Breunig and Claire Hartman, fared. Nehring finished seventh in all-around competition (34.650) while Breunig (34.450) and Hartman (33.800) were right behind in eighth and ninth. Of Breunig and Hartman, Breunig came the closest to advancing to the individual state meet, finishing sixth in bars (8.550) and missing out by a quarter of a point (.250) to Nehring while also finishing sixth in beam (8.900) and missing out by the same quarter-of-a-point margin to Elkhorn’s Kaylee Frank (8.925). Nehring said it was “bittersweet” taking fifth in the bars, so closely ahead of her teammate and friend. And she said it felt the same knowing she was advancing while Breunig also came so close — but fell short — on the beam. “That’s her event,” Nehring said. Breunig tied for seventh on the floor (8.950) and tied for 23rd in vault (8.050). Hartman, meantime, was seventh in bars (8.450), tied for seventh in floor (8.950), tied for 17th in vault (8.250) and 18th in beam (8.150). Both girls competed at state in 2023 — Breunig all-around and Hartman on floor — so Thursday’s results were obviously not what they wanted. But both knew it wouldn’t be easy to return to Rapids. “To know going into it that they really had to put their absolute best performance out today to even have a chance, that’s a lot of pressure,” Anderson said. “It’s harder to lose by .025 or by .1 than by 2 points,” she added of how close both came, “but it will give them motivation for next year.” The program as a whole will also try to build on this season, one that included that school-record score at conference and also a best-ever second-place showing at conference. The Eagles are on the rise. “It’s crazy to think that almost a 135 isn’t sending us to state, because at a lot of other sectionals it does,” Anderson said, before zooming out and taking a more big-picture view of what her team accomplished Thursday. “Last place today got a 118, and I used to dream of getting a 118. We couldn’t even break a 110 for a few years, or we’d be in the 1-teens for a lot of years. So it is cool to look at it from the perspective that, ‘OK, we didn’t go to state today and we got a 135, what the heck? But also, we’ve grown 20 points in 10 years.’ “So that is pretty cool.” Nehring agreed. “We really came together as a team,” she said. “Everyone was cheering each other on. We never had a problem this year with team dynamics and relationships between girls, but it was a different energy today. We’re all so close that we know what each and every girl wants on each and every event, so you really want that for them deep down. So it was really cool to see us come out here and do a really good meet. “Even though the scores were a bit lower because of (tougher judging at) sectionals, it was just really good to see everyone come out and hit their routines and be proud of it.”