Nov. 25, 2009
As we know Black and Gold is just right around the corner and we can't wait. This past week was our last push before we got to go home for Thanksgiving break. As a team we decided that we really wanted to do a 4-event intra-squad before we went home. We planned to do it on Friday because we knew our boosters were going to come in and watch practice that day.
Throughout the week we had been working on the smaller details in routines while adding pressure at the same time. For example, on bars you had 2 routines but if on your first routine you missed a cast handstand in your first half you had an extra first half, if you missed a cast handstand in your second half you had an extra second half, and if you missed a cast in both you had another routine to do after you made the two that were already assigned. On beam Amy worked on small details too. Each person had to work on something different that would help improve their beam set. I had to work on taking a shorter amount of time before my series along with pointing my toes. Throughout the week we kept up with our conditioning and weight lifting like usual so we would be ready for Friday.
On Friday, because we had the intra-squad, we didn't have to condition before practice so we were fresh and ready to go. We split up into two groups. The black team had Sarah, Becky, Tori, Allie and Alex. The gold team had Me, Mary, Brooke, Tara, Lauren and Brittany. On vault we put up nine 10.0 starting vaults! Everyone's vaults looked great! On bars our coaches were looking for us to be more aggressive than the last time we had a bar intra-squad and we were. Everyone looked confident and aggressive all the way through. You could see an improvement on us hitting our handstands this time around, which showed us that the assignment we were doing all week paid off. On beam everyone really focused on the improvements that we had worked so much on. We had a few mistakes but Amy was happy that everyone went aggressively and really tried to make the changes that she had talked about. Floor was fun because it was the first time we were actually performing our routines to a crowd. It's always funny to see how the freshman do with that because I remember when I was a freshman how nervous I got when we had to actually perform it and get the crowd excited. They handled it well and our routines are looking great. Shi and Mary both upgraded their first passes. Shi is opening with round off whip back handspring double tuck and Mary is doing a HUGE double Arabian.
When the intra-squad was over we thought because how well we did that we were maybe going to do an easier conditioning. Unfortunately we were wrong, haha, but the boosters got to see how hard we worked to get in shape for this season. The conditioning was so hard but it was the last push before everyone got to go home for Thanksgiving, so it was so worth it.
I want to thank the boosters for coming in on Friday! We really enjoyed having you all there cheering for us (and of course the oranges)!!! Can't wait to see everyone at our Black and Gold on Friday, December 11!!!! GO TIGERS!!!!!!!