Dec. 3, 2004

This week has been a great week for SWG. Everyone came back from Thanksgiving break refreshed and excited to continue training as season approaches. I had a great Thanksgiving break at home in Plano, where I got to spend lots of time with my family and my WOGA teammates.

Back here at Stanford this week, we've been working to get our routines cleaned up and ready for our first real intersquad coming up right before Christmas break. Today we had a mini intersquad on bars, and everyone looked great. The most exciting part of this intersquad was Tabby being in the lineup and totally rocking. She is able to do more and more everyday as she recovers from her Achilles injury, and everyone is very happy to see her in bars lineup. Nat and Liz also look awesome, with Nat doing double lay full outs and Liz doing Tkatchev immediate overshoot. We're all very pumped about our preseason coaches' poll #3 ranking, which is the highest preseason ranking ever for SWG. We can't wait to live up to this high ranking when competition starts in January.

In school, this week is called Dead Week. From what I've been told, this used to mean that there were no classes and no new concepts were introduced. However, that is not the case anymore. I've heard students say that it is called Dead Week now because they are trying to kill us with new concepts and regular classes on top of studying for finals next week and final papers that are due. (lol) I actually haven't had that much work and have only one exam next week, so I guess that it is called Dead Week just because. I had my last class in PWR today, and I gave my first ever oral presentation in my whole life. Since I did online school I obviously didn't have the opportunity to do oral presentations. I would like to give a special thanks to Lauren for helping me on this - I had no idea what I was doing and would have failed miserably without her!

Oh yeah, it's my brother Tim's birthday today. Sweet 16! Yikes, he's driving! Just kidding, love ya Tim, happy birthday! I hope everyone has an awesome holiday season and hopefully y'all are as excited as we are about competition season coming up in January! GO CARD!

~Stephanie Gentry