2015 U.S. Nationals Post-Mortem: Most-Improved Roll Call!

I’ve got a few statistic-ish things to tide you over until I get a longer post written about 2015 U.S. Nationals:

Number of senior men who broke 200 with their total score THIS YEAR: 13. LAST YEAR: only 10. Take that, quad-hungry media!! (she says somewhat facetiously)

But we'll get to that another time.

Most notable points-gainers among the MEN between last year’s and this year’s Nats:

Silver medalist Adam Rippon (from 222.19 to 272.48)

9^th place Grant Hochstein (from 198.50 to 230.28)

12^th place Sean Rabbitt (from 183.34 to 211.24)

Most notable points-gainers among the LADIES:

Gold medalist Ashley Wagner (from 182.74 to 221.02)

6^th place Mariah Bell (from 149.44 to 180.25)

Most notable points-gainers among the PAIRS:

5^th place Calalang/Sidhu (from 151.65 to 174.32)

Gold medalists Scimeca/Knierim (from 189.67 to 210.49)

Silver medalists H.Denney/Fraizer (from 181.59 to 199.92)

Bronze medalists Kayne/O’Shea (from 173.89 to 185.31)

On this one, it’s worth mentioning that none of the 2014 podium pairs—Castelli/Shnapir, Zhang/Bartholomay, and C. Denney/Coughlin—were competing this time, and those that finished 1-2-3 this year were 4-5-6 (in the same order) last year. But also worth mentioning is that Calalang/Sidhu were all the way down in 11^th a year ago.

As for the remains of those 2014 top teams? Marissa Castelli/Mervin Tran finished 6^th... Nate Bartholomay and his new partner, Gretchen Donlan, were 7^th... and Simon Shnapir landed in 8^th with new partner Dee Dee Leng.

Finally, the most notable points-gainers among the DANCE teams (sorry, I rounded these points rather than left them intact):

12^th place Ponomaryova/Altukhov (from 74 to 98)

7^th place Gamelin/Gamelin (from 113 to 131)

5^th place Cannuscio/McManus (from 141 to 156)

As for our Top 4? Interesting story there too:

Gold medalists Chock/Bates went from 181 in ’14 to 185 this year—gain of 4 points 

Silver medalists Shibutani/Shibutani went from 170 to 181— a gain of 11 points

Bronze medalists Hubbell/Donohue went from 168 to 165— a LOSS of 3 points

Pewter medalists Hawayek/Baker went from 152 (at the Junior level) to 162—a gain of 10 points

And by the way, a special thank you to Jason Brown for making at least ONE of my podium predictions, aside from all the Dance guesses, accurate! (Only 5 for 16-- yikes!!)

How about you? Did your dream podium turn up somewhere over the weekend? Comments are welcome! As for me—whew. Still sorting all that excitement out in my head and repeated viewings of stuff, let alone via blog post! But I’ll be back with something else to say about it all in a few days.

In the meantime, European Championships have already started! Go hunt down a feed and see who’s winning!