March Madness

Only two entries so far this month!?  Wow, I'm seriously slacking, for it isn't due to lack of things going on.  I've been sick recently and so I'll use that as my excuse.  Coupled with laziness and there you have it.

Since T's birthday and my trip to Malibu I tied up my first quarter as a Stanford professor (I use that term loosely because it makes me feel powerful, haha).  On the last day I gave my students their final exam where they had to perform the skill they were most proud of learning in the span of 10 weeks.  We had lots of front flips and handstands going around and it was fun to see how excited they still were about it all.  Next quarter I'll be teaching the same class again as well as the intermediate level; and for my efforts I get to continue my tennis lessons and other fitness classes.  It's definitely a great trade-off!

Our level 7's had a final regular-season competition in Novato on St. Patrick's Day.  It was pretty easy drive and because it was only one session it went quickly.  We were up against some stiff competition in CGA and we came in second.  Not terrible, but there is some cleaning up to do before State comes along in a couple of weeks.  We thought they really fought for the things that were off but it's all in the details from here on out.  When I got home from the meet Megan and I celebrated with pizza...always a favorite...and then I crashed.  I often forget how tired I am after meets...even one session of that type of emotional roller-coaster gets to me.

The next week of training was prep for the level 8 team because they had their state competition yesterday.  Held in Livermore, we had one kid in the 8am session and two in the 5pm session.  We decided to train through this competition in the hopes that the girls would make a good showing but not yet reach their peak given that they were trying to find their way to Regionals.  None of them had a problem with that, easily getting the required qualification score, but there were some hiccups along the way.  However, there were also some stand-out performances including my very first optional state vault champion!!  This girl, Avery, was in the morning session and her pike tsuk was good enough to earn a 9.425.  The score held throughout the second half of the meet and really I think I was more excited than she was.  Even better was that at the end of the day when the team scores were released I found out that as a team we ranked the highest on vault out of all four events.  Woohoo!!  Maybe I'm doing something right after all.

Sprinkled in to all these meets were other fun events, like Alex (finally) finishing up his Stanford degree!!  I give him a hard time because it's been almost 6 years now but of course he took the year off last year to train which requires such dedication that I feel bad about kidding with him.  His last Stanford final was on Friday and proved to be rather difficult, fitting of course given that we had more than our share of struggles along the way.  We went out to celebrate later that night and I had a fun time talking with everyone that came to Nola's for drinks.  Also in there was the Pac-12 gymnastics competition on Saturday night.  Carly and I drove up to see T's new digs (she's living in a "treehouse") before going into Berkeley to watch the competition.  T had called a few places and found one that was willing to show the meet, though upon our arrival the place was jam-packed given that Cal was playing in March Madness.  At first it looked like we weren't going to be able to watch it but the guy felt badly about the situation so set us up in his office at the back of the bar.  It was really great of him to do so though we were laughing at the whole situation.  Stanford could have performed better but hopefully what they lacked this weekend will fire them up for the upcoming regional meet.  They got seeded today and will be heading back to Oklahoma to vie for a spot at the NCAA Championships.

This weekend there's no competition but I'm going home for Carter Family Passover.  After that we have level 7 state (Leemore, CA), level 8 regionals (Phoenix, AZ), and this new thing USAG is doing...level 7 regionals (Las Vegas, NV).  Lots of traveling but it will all be over at the end of April which I know will come up all too quickly.