January 21, 2008

Hi Everyone!

Well by now SWG has been back in school for two weeks and we have all settled into the old routine of classes and practice once again. In this round, however, we have the extra-added bonus of competition season! For the freshmen, including myself, it has been exciting to learn all about college gymnastics meets and especially fun to go out and perform in front of the home crowd in Burnham.

This year we were lucky enough to have two home meets in a row to start off the season. After last Sunday's competition against Georgia, we got back in the gym to work even harder and prepare for facing Arizona. We discussed team commitments and goals to ensure that everyone on the team was on the same page, which is especially important with a team of seventeen girls! As far as actual gymnastics goes, this week we worked on increasing our depth and getting some new faces into the lineup while at the same time holding onto and strengthening the new habits concerning detail that we have been focusing on lately. At our traditional pre-meet intrasquad on Friday, we changed up the warm-ups somewhat to give us extra time to work on the events. We also had some new performances on each event, giving some of the girls a chance to earn their spots in the lineup and show the rest of the team that they were ready to compete for SWG.

Just like last week, we started the meet against Arizona on vault and had a strong first rotation. Steph highlighted the event with an especially beautiful yurchenko laid out with a full twist. It was also great to have Alex competing to add variety to our lineup. We rocked bars. Again Alex made an impression by adding her Tkatchev release. After another solid start from Lauren on beam we seemed to lose a little bit of our focus. Floor turned out rougher than we expected, but Kelly did an awesome routine and it was great to see Heather tumbling on the hard floor again. We did see a lot of new people in the lineups (15 out of 17 of us competed!). In the end we pulled out a win despite the rough patches, but more importantly the meet was a major learning experience and wakeup call for what we need to do to be ready for next weekend's big competition at UCLA. We are all determined to bring back the focus that we know is in us and get our work done. Thanks for checking in and GO CARD!

Gretchen O'Henley