Jan. 21, 2009

After two weeks away from the competition floor, SWG went to battle in Seattle against Washington, Sacramento State, and Seattle Pacific. In preparation for the end of the season, we endured a grueling week of conditioning leading up to this competition. Though our bodies were sore, our minds were sharp when we entered the arena.

Starting off on bars, we nailed six for six routines - exactly the way you want start a meet. Alyssa Brown made her debut in the bar lineup proving herself a calm and cool competitor. Moving to beam, we greatly improved on our performance in Cancun. Heather Purnell and Shelley Alexander, the bookends of the lineup, were certainly the highlights of the rotation, each displaying a confident swagger (shout out to Shell for her sweet smile after sticking her layout-layout).

With two events down, we moved to floor where the underclassmen made a very impressive showing. Peach (Nicole Pechanec) dazzled the crowed, as she always does, with her beautiful dancing that lights up our whole team. Finishing on vault, we made good strides toward improving our body positions and sticking our landings. Gretchen "Oh-snap!" Henley waited the entire meet to compete as the last member of our vault line up and was met with a rush of cheers and hugs after a delivering a huge vault for SWG. We rejoiced as a team, not in our score, but in reaching many of our performance goals. Still, as happy as we were with the competition, we know that we have hardly begun to reach our full potential.

With two meets under our belt, we are directing our focus on the details and capturing the swagger of SWG in every element we perform. We could not be more excited for our first home meet on Thursday! I can say from experience that there is nothing so exciting as performing for a home crowd in a small, jam-packed gymnasium.

We plan to build on the momentum we have from last week and bring this program one step closer to making history.