Stars Challenge

This weekend Twisters compulsories traveled to Union City for the Stars Challenge, hosted by Pacific West Gymnastics.  Saturday morning began with our level 4 team and they came in on fire.  This was the toughest competition we've faced so far and we managed to come out on top in the end.  We had some mistakes here and there but overall, relative to everyone else, it was a good day.  The highlight was adding in another all-around competitor, who was able to pull out a floor routine for the first time in a meet setting.  It was fun to see her teammates get so excited for her and she won the team award at the end of the day.

After the meet I came home and was quickly losing motivation to go for a run when Cat called me and asked me to run around campus with her.  I didn't want to but once we got started it was fun.  We broke it up so that we'd run for 0.5 miles and then stop and do conditioning exercises, which was great except for all the weird looks we got because we were doing random things in the middle of campus.  After that I came home to shower and get ready for dinner, which I thought was just going to be with CJ and Weedge, but Liz, Tabbs, and Ming ended up joining us.  We had a great meal at Darbar and were there for a couple of hours just chit-chatting and such.  Liz leaves for Chicago today because she got a job transfer there, so it was nice to be able to see her before she was off.

This morning the level 6 team came to join in on the fun of the competition, but they had a bit of a rough go.  We started on bars and the scores were pretty low before we were able to pick it up.  Luckily the bar scores remained low for the rest of the meet, otherwise I would have felt really terrible about my coaching, but it still wasn't they way we wanted to kick things off.  In the end we didn't have the best day and for the first time our girls were defeated.  There was a lot of positive feedback from the judges though, so there's lots of good stuff to work on in the gym in the next couple of weeks.