Valorie Kondos Field: Vanessa Zamarripa will not go to 2010 World Championships

UCLA star and new U.S. National team member Vanessa Zamarripa will not be going for the 2010 U.S. World team, UCLA coach Valorie Kondos Field announced to the media earlier this week.

At a UCLA press conference held after Zamarripa and Kondos Field returned to Los Angeles, Kondos Field said a discussion with U.S. National team coordinator Martha Karolyi made it clear that while the junior to be performed extremely well at last week's U.S. Championships, she needs to bump up her difficulty in order to be competitive on the world stage.

"As far as Vanessa is concerned, we really went into this season just to get her feet wet," Kondos Field said. "We have discussed with Martha that she is really not in a position to, gymnastically even, to go to the World training camp and make a run for that team because we need to work on her start values."

On night one of the U.S. Championships, she stunned spectators and national team staff alike by sticking a Cheng vault (roundoff, half on, front layout 1.5 twists off). The skill, valued at a 6.3 difficulty, was the hardest vault performed by anyone at the U.S. Championships, including 2008 Olympic vault finalist Alicia Sacramone, who won the event title by performing a Rudi (the same vault as Zamarripa but without the roundoff, half on entry) and a double twisting Yurchenko. (After the competition, Zamarripa divulged that she too could perform a double twisting Yurchenko.)

But during the all-around final, Zamarripa didn't quite get the height or rotation she needed on the Cheng, and had to touch her hands to the mat, incurring a 1.0 deduction. Elsewhere, she had difficulty with her beam routine in both preliminaries and finals. While she showed clean gymnastics on floor and bars, she performed without the difficulty of some others. Zamarripa finished eighth all-around.

Some analysts speculated that even only making the Cheng 50 percent of the time would be enough for Zamarripa to merit a place on the women's World team, but Karolyi thought otherwise.

"While she competed her new vault beautifully for the first time, the second night she competed it she did put a hand down," Kondos Field said. "So it isn't as consistent obviously as Martha would want it to be to take her to Worlds. And Martha was very up front and clear with us about that."

Karolyi's prescription: A good six months training the Cheng so Zamarripa will be able to throw it anytime she needs to -- "and we feel exactly the same way," Kondos Field said. Zamarripa will likely attend a training camp focused on skillbuilding at the Karolyi Ranch in November.

Zamarripa had been one of the best level 10 gymnasts in the U.S. before coming to UCLA in 2009, but had never seriously trained for elite level gymnastics before this year.

"Vanessa was in awe of quite a few of the athletes there," Kondos Field said of Zamarripa's first U.S. Championships at the elite level. "I think that she was just taking it all in. I think that she vacillated between being a part of it and taking it all in."

Kondos Field said that with some of the top elite athletes on the U.S. team already having signed with NCAA schools, there is hope of greater cooperation between collegiate programs and the U.S. National Team staff so gymnasts would no longer "have to choose between college and elite gymnastics."

Defending NCAA team champion UCLA has a gym full of athletes who potentially could be among those to compete internationally. In addition to Zamarripa, the team includes two-time Dutch national champion Lichelle Wong, who will be going into her sophomore year in 2010-2011,and 2008 Olympian Samantha Peszek and former U.S. team member Olivia Courtney, both incoming freshmen.

Historically, a very few elite gymnasts have been able to contend seriously for U.S. Olympic teams. Among them are 1988 Olympic beam finalist Kelly Garrison Steves, who competed for the University of Oklahoma, and 2004 Olympic silver medalist Mohini Bhardwaj, who exhausted her NCAA eligibility at UCLA before her successful Olympic bid. UCLA's Kate Richardson was also a 2004 Olympian for Canada while attending the university.

The U.S. women's World team will be announced following a final training camp at the Karolyi Ranch at the end of September.

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Vanessa Zamarripa, 2010 U.S. Championships prelims, vault one (the amazing Cheng):