SECTION PLAYOFFS : Gymnastics : Torrey Pines Backs Up Talk : Falcons Beat San Pasqual Easily for First Title

Torrey Pines has its team title, and Shawn Wirth her integrity. Not bad for an afternoon’s work.

By winning the San Diego Section team gymnastics title Thursday at Torrey Pines by a landslide, the host Falcons won their first team championship and made an honest woman of four-year coach Wirth, who repeatedly said her gymnasts were destined to win it.

“I was really nervous,” Wirth said after her optional gymnasts scored 110.70 points to defeat second-place San Pasqual (105.55). “All year I’ve been saying we’d win. It would have looked pretty bad if we hadn’t.”

Combined with Wednesday’s compulsory scores, the Falcons finished with a school-record 220.10--Mt. Carmel’s 1987 section record is 221.25. Runner-up San Pasqual finished with 210.30 and defending champion Santana, second after compulsories, slipped to third with 206.90.

“They knew they had a job to do,” Wirth said of all the hype. “We didn’t have any score we wanted to reach, we just wanted to hit all our routines.”

Defending section champion Tasha Taylor had two firsts (vault and uneven bars), a second (balance beam) and a third (floor exercise) and set a school record (38.00) en route to her second consecutive all-around title.

“It’s great,” Taylor said. “I would have let myself down if I hadn’t won.”

But Taylor said Wirth’s title talk didn’t pressure her too much.

“It didn’t put all that much pressure on me,” she said, “but I tend to perform better when I’m under a lot of pressure, anyway.”

Fallbrook freshman Paige Peterman, who Taylor figured would press her for the individual title, started strong on the floor exercise but had a break on bars and fell on a difficult back tuck on the balance beam that dropped her to fourth in the all-around.

“If I had only done better on bars and beam . . . “ she said. Peterman was first on floor--she won it with a 9.6 to Taylor’s 9.55.

Second in the all-around was Falcon junior Julie Kawasaki, whose difficult front headspring into an immediate back handspring was the spark that helped lift her to a first-place 9.55 in the balance beam. She was fifth on vault and eighth on floor.

Kawasaki competes with Taylor at the Gymnastics Center of San Diego and said Taylor pushes her harder in meets.

“She’s on a higher level then me, she drives me to excel,” said Kawasaki, who was never worried about her team’s chances. “I was just trying to do my best. We didn’t have to worry about winning because we had that cushion from compulsories.”

Torrey Pines had just one slight break during an otherwise flawless day.

“We hit everything,” Wirth said. “There was just that one extra swing.”

Before Taylor’s difficult toe-on, front tuck dismount on her uneven bar routine, she took an extra giant swing.

“I had to get that second giant in,” Taylor said, who won despite the mistake. “I was going too fast to get my toes on.”