Pike's Peak Cup

Optional season 2013 has officially started for Twisters!  Allan, Ericka, and I left SFO yesterday, flew through LAX, and landed in Colorado Springs at about 8:05pm last night.  It's a very small airport in comparison to others I've been to recently but that didn't make the rental car desk any easier to find.  We unfortunately missed it the first time, spent some time looking for it out in the cold, and then finally went back inside and successfully found it.  Hertz gave us a Chevy Malibu and we began the short trek to The Broadmoor Hotel (our accommodations as well as the meet site); we plugged the address into the GPS and were first taken to a museum before we were rerouted to the correct place.  By the time we arrived and checked-in we were tired and hungry so made our way to one of the very many restaurants this place has to offer.

Before I go any further, I must emphasize how amazing this hotel is.  It's very grand and there are people around every corner ready to help you with anything you need.  We are actually staying in the west-side building, across the lake from the front.  Right now the lake is frozen over and is a beautiful site to see, especially in the morning.  Anyway, we finally got to dinner at a place where there was live music and some dancing.  The band was playing covers of some older songs and it was a pretty good time.  Allan did not skimp on our orders and ended up with oysters, wine, fish, meat...it was great (and $170).  We took our time eating but found ourselves exhausted so we went to bed only to get up early this morning for the first session of the competition.

Our level 7 team consists of five people at the moment and they came in full of energy and ready to go. It was quite cold at the meet site but the girls handled it well, warmed up, marched out, and began on floor.  We had a very strong showing there as well as on bars (surprisingly).  We didn't have a missed routine all day and that took the team to a second place finish!!  We also had a floor and bars champ; we were very happy to kick off the year this way and are proud of the way the girls competed.  In the second session we had one level 8 who had a bit of a rough week at practice but seemed like she was confident when she arrived.  She started on vault and put a tsuk on the hard ground for the first time...successfully!  This allowed me to sigh with relief because I really was worried about it and I was able to relax a little bit more for the rest of the competition.  She was really aggressive on bars but ended up falling on a free-hip handstand (props for going for it though!) and was severely robbed on floor.  She definitely had some of the best tumbling in the meet but the judges didn't care for some of her dance so took away points on petty things like her starting pose (who knew judges actually did that).  In the end she was fourth all-around, again a great place to start.

We are going to find another, probably fantastic, place for dinner tonight and then it's early to bed because we have a flight to catch at 7am tomorrow morning.  We'll get home around 11:45am, enjoy the weekend, and then it's back to work.  I'm excited to see where this season will take us because we were very successful last year and we definitely started off better this time around.  I think congratulations are in order for the girls and for my first travel meet as a coach, I can't think of a way in which it could have gone better!