July 2, 2007

Hey SWG Fans,

Welcome to the summer 2007 edition of Inside the Locker Room. In the past years we have not kept our fans up to date during the off season, but this year the team felt it was important to let you know how our preparation for the 2008 season was coming along!

To begin with a recap of the 2007 season: SWG had an AMAZING performance at NCAAs. We qualified for Super Six for the third time in six years and finished 5th overall, a mere four tenths out of 2nd place. As a team we hit 54/54 routines (the only team to do so!!). After returning from Salt Lake City we had two weeks off of practice to catch up on school work and rest before we started our journey for the 2008 season. On May 15th we started our post season conditioning, which consisted of cardio, gym specific exercises, weight training, as well as Swiss ball exercises and active flexibility! It was certainly not easy, but it felt great to get back into the gym as a team and feel SORE again…hahaha. At the beginning of June we had our last team meeting of the season and discussed our goals for the coming year…National Champions… and what we needed to be doing individually over the summer to be prepared for preseason in September. One of the big concerns was to increase the level of difficulty in our routines. Therefore, we decided that instead of just strictly focusing on conditioning and maintaining skills over the summer we all need to focus on having our NEW skills prepared to go by September!! Conditioning will not be sidelined though because we still have to pass our fitness test as a team the day we get back in order to start training gymnastics!

With those goals in mind we have all started to go our separate ways….home, summer school/ classes, internships, working summer camps, research positions, vacations! More than half the team is staying on or near campus this summer though, which is really exciting and will allow us to train together!

Thanks again for checking in with SWG, we really appreciate all of your continued support. By the way, Stanford has just clinched the Director's Cup for the 13th year in a row WOOHOO-GO CARD!!

--Nikki