River City Classic

The Twisters compulsories participated in Byers' River City Classic yesterday, kicked butt, and took names!!  I arrived at the newer Byers facility around 11:45am and took time to walk around, give hugs out to people I new, and get re-aquainted with my home club.  It was awesome to see Eli and Debbie and everyone else in the Byers family after so long and we easily filled time reminiscing and swapping life stories.  Before I knew it it was time to get our level 4's warmed up and then we were off and running.  Unlike the last competition we were in all our 4's were in the same session, which was nice.  We were split into two squads, one starting on vault and the other on beam; we started off strong right away and then from there we never looked back.  It was awesome to see the girls applying all the drills we've been working on and to see them rewarded for their efforts.  In the end we swept the all-around titles, had multiple individual event winners, took the team totals on each event, as well as the overall team score; we ended up beating second place by almost four points!!  We were also able to qualify three more girls to the State Championships, so now all the 4's competing all-around have made it.  There was happiness all over the place, from the girls to the parents and even to us coaches.  Allan really wanted us to come in and beat Byers on their home turf so to do that felt pretty awesome :)

The afternoon continued after a bit of a break (more time to catch up with old friends) with our level 6's.  There are only four of them and looking at Byers' team of 14, we knew we had our work cut out for us.  We started on beam and unfortunately had two kids come off but we rallied on floor and vault before closing it out on bars.  In the end us coaches couldn't wait for awards so we snagged the score sheet as soon as it was available and looked to see where we stood.  We had all-around champs in two of the three age divisions, as well as individual event winners.  Just as in the level 4 session earlier we swept the team event titles and came out on top of the standings in the overall team competition.  It's crazy to think that our four girls were able to best some really great and much bigger teams; many coaches came up to us to comment on how good they looked which was surprising because I don't think we felt that they had their best day.  I guess it just goes to show that it's all relative and today we were better than the competition.

The other fun part of the level 6 session was watching Eli and Debbie's almost 10-year-old daughter Lillian compete.  She came in third behind two of our girls and had a great competition.  It's crazy to think back to when I first came to Byers and Debbie was pregnant with her, and then how we would build her a play-pen out of panel mats when she was really young and in the gym.  Now she's flipping around and is a real person!  You can tell she loves gymnastics and Eli and Debbie are great about separating their coaching and their parenting.  They love to watch her and just see what happens, which seems to be working!  Congrats, Lilly!!

Next weekend we're off from competition but then we're back at it the following week when we go to Union City for the Stars Challenge.  Hopefully we can continue to improve and get more of our level 4's competing all-around and qualifying to State.