May 2, 2007

Hey SWG Fans,

Well the SWG 2007 season has come to an end after an exciting and successful week spent in Salt Lake City! Our week started out with a surprise from the coaches. Normally when we travel to the airport we take a large coach bus, but this time our team was riding in style with an Escalade limo. We had a fun time watching and singing along to Mariah Carey music videos!! After arriving in Salt Lake City we went to dinner and then saw Blades of Glory, which was absolutely hilarious and a great motivational video to see before our competition…haha! I can guarantee that we will be quoting lines from that movie for quite a long time.

Wednesday morning was devoted to studying and then we had a very light practice in the afternoon to get used to the equipment and get our bodies moving. After practice Aimee’s parents kindly invited us for a team dinner. We all enjoyed a delicious meal and spent some time watching Aimee in old family videos of her gymnastics competitions. On Thursday we were in the second session of prelims. The way that NCAAs work is that there are two sessions of prelims each comprised of six teams and the top three teams of the night qualify for Super Six competition on Friday. We were competing against the University of Utah, UCLA, LSU, University of Michigan and University of Denver. After hitting 24 for 24 routines (first time since January) we finished 2nd just .125 behind Utah, which meant that we had qualified for the second day of competition! It was just the third time in six years that Stanford has qualified for Super Six!

We were all very excited, but knew that we needed to get some good rest before going out to compete for the second day in a row. Friday night was the big night that we had been waiting and preparing for all year. I think I can speak for the whole team that it was such a great rush to go out and compete in front of 10,000 screaming fans with the five other premier teams in the country. Nobody on the team had previously competed at the NCAA “Super Six” competition, so it was quite impressive when we went out with laser like focus and hit 24 for 24 routines for the second night in a row! At the end of the night we ended up finishing 5th, just four tenths behind the second place team and we can proudly say we were the only team to have a 100% hitting rate! Even though it is not quite where we had hoped to finish it was a huge stepping stone from our previous season and will keep us fired up and hungry for next years season.

The week was not over after Friday night however. On Saturday morning there was brunch for all the competitors and coaches and after we were able to spend the afternoon with our family. Saturday night was individual finals and Stanford made history by having 6 different girls with All American honors. The hitting percentage increased yet again after all the girls in event finals nailed their routines. Saturday night after the competition we headed back to Aimee’s house again and had a team sleepover. We enjoyed a sundae bar while watching a movie and relaxing our bodies. WE spent our last day in Utah at Park City and had the experience of going down a zip line that was built over some of the down hill ski slopes from the Olympic Games. It was a thrilling experience and a great way to wake ourselves up before a long day of studying.

Sorry for the long post, but there was a week of activities to explain! SWG would like to say thank you so much for supporting us throughout the season it really means a lot and we greatly appreciate it! On May 15th we will be getting back to work in the gym to prepare for the 2008 edition of SWG!!

BOOM!!

Thanks again and GO CARD!

Nikki