BERKELEY – California men's gymnastics will celebrate its four graduating seniors this Saturday in the team's second straight meet at Haas Pavilion, hoping to build upon the momentum from last weekend's season-high team score and close out the 2023 regular season strong. At 2 p.m., Aidan Giusti, Will Lavanakul, Yu-Chen Lee and Darren Wong will be gifted with a wooden bear statue and a framed jersey to honor their careers as Golden Bears before Cal shares the floor with No. 1 Oklahoma in the home squad's final meet in Berkeley.
 
Giusti, who hails from North Kingstown, Rhode Island, and is majoring in legal studies, has contributed on floor, rings, vault, parallel bars and horizontal bar during his time at Cal. He has three College Gymnastics Association (CGA) Scholar-Athlete, two Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) All-Academic and two Pac-12 Academic Honor Roll titles to his name.
 
Lavanakul, a native of in-state Dublin and a pommel horse specialist, has three entries on Cal's modern program top-10 list, including a No. 2 score that earned him CGA Specialist of the Week honors in 2021. At last season's NCAA Championships in Norman, Oklahoma, he hit his routine and qualified for the final, finishing ninth. He is graduating with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, having accumulated two CGA Scholar-Athlete, two MPSF All-Academic and two Pac-12 Academic Honor Roll nods throughout his career.
 
Lee, a product of Taipei, Taiwan, is one of the team's most reliable all-around gymnasts as well as a team captain. Last year, he competed in the all-around at the NCAA Championships and reached the final on parallel bars. He has accumulated three MPSF Gymnast of the Week awards and a CGA Gymnast of the Week award over the years, as well as three annual Hardest Worker awards given by the team. Lee is majoring in integrative biology with an emphasis on human biology; he is a three-time CGA Scholar-Athlete and MPSF All-Academic honoree, also earning his way onto the Pac-12 Academic Honor Roll.
 
Wong arrived at Cal in 2019 from Vancouver, British Columbia, and quickly became one of the team's top gymnasts, earning MPSF Gymnast of the Week honors and reaching the all-around finals at the NCAA Championships in Champaign, Illinois. Currently, he owns the modern program records on pommel horse and parallel bars, as well as four entries on Cal's floor top 10 list and two entries on the top-5 all-around list. Wong, a team captain and data science major, spent much of the following years sidelined by injury but takes pride in mentoring his teammates and "watching (them) grow not only as gymnasts but also as young adults."
 
To head coach J.T. Okada, this year's senior class is a particularly resilient group. "This is the class that was arguably most impacted by COVID," he said. "Our five-year seniors experienced a normal season in their freshman year, and had that taken away from them the next year; for the four-year guys, they abruptly had their freshman seasons cut short. This season is actually the first time since then that we haven't had our training limited in some way by protocol – the seniors are just grateful to be able to get into the gym every day. They've experienced a full breadth of highs and lows during their time here."
 
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