October 9, 2006

Hey SWG Fans!!

The second week of class has come to a close and I think we were all very excited for this weekend. Last weekend we had four recruits visiting for the class of 2011. On Saturday we all got together and had lunch and played some afternoon sand volleyball. We were all pretty competitive when it came to challenging the wrestlers and unfortunately we were unable to pull off a win, but I think the recruits along with everyone else would probably advised us to stick to gymnastics. After volleyball some of the girls had put together a scavenger hunt to show the recruits special landmarks around campus including the new football stadium, the libraries and of course Palm Drive. For dinner that night we decided to take a trip to University Avenue and walk around for awhile. We then concluded the night at the home volleyball game to show the girls our school spirit.

After the recruits left on Sunday we began our week of hard conditioning, light gymnastics. Even with a heavier work load and the tough conditioning it was encouraging watching everyone push through, knowing that this just puts us one week closer to competition season. It is definitely obvious that we are all ready to start training big skills because on Friday during our open practice there was lots of flipping and twisting happening. It was especially fun watching the Frosh do gymnastics to get a grasp on what kind of talent we have this year!! This next week should be exciting as we cut back on conditioning and start to focus on our skills and combinations. Just wanted to give a quick shout out to Steph Gentry for being voted the hardest worker this week and wearing the "yellow jersey".

This year we have also started to set aside fifteen minutes at the end of most practices for different team challenges. Mike was in charge of creating the challenges this week and the one that stood out in my mind happened on Monday. We were separated into two teams and each team had a leader and a messenger and the remaining members were blindfolded. The goal of the challenge was for the blindfolded members to take a piece of 30ft rope and make into an equilateral pentagon where each person was holding a corner. However, the leader could only talk to the messenger and the blindfolded members could only talk to the messenger. It was a great exercise demonstrating how important each person's role is on a team and how helpless you feel when you can't see what needs to be fixed.

Thanks for checking in this week!! GO CARD!

Nikki