Hey everyone, it's Rose, the first freshmen of your Great 8 with gym talk!
For our final fall break practice, we worked on our team quote, and concluded our day with a team building activity where each person raced to get an Oreo in their mouth only using their face muscles. Shout out to Lauryn Stiff and Jenny Jackson for winning the competition!
This week our confidence has been getting higher; our vaults are improving, our releases on bars are flying, and everyone's tumbling is looking powerful. Congratulations Kendall Knapps for catching your Gienger on bars!
It is so exciting to see partial and complete routines coming together as well. Shout out to Taylor Ann Wilson for hitting the first half of her bar routine last Tuesday!
After having our team retreat over the week-end of fall break, and with no classes on Monday and Tuesday we were able to get in some good team practice time. We then had Wednesday and Thursday off from gym. This gave us a chance to rest our bodies and to get back into the swing of things with classes starting up again.
By Friday, we were back to our regular schedule, and still making more improvements in the gym. Kendall Huff has been taking more and more mats away on her brand-new beam acro series, and Kennedy Stevens has been hitting beautiful front aerials on beam every day.
This Saturday we started a new team warmup and we also played "Beam Queen." Beam Queen is a game on beam where we roll a dice to select what skill everyone does. Then we draw cards, and the person who draws the queen is the "Beam Queen." The "Beam Queen" goes last, they must make their skill for the group to move forward. "Playing" these types of games is helping us to start getting used to handling pressure and having to hit when it counts.
Finally, on Sunday, our new faculty mentor, Dr. Jennifer Stokes and her husband came to watch part of our practice and brought us some yummy homemade protein snacks. We are excited for this new program in our athletic department and to be lucky enough to have Dr. Stokes pick gymnastics! It was such a pleasure to have them there!
Stay tuned as season kicks into high gear!
Yours Truly, Rose Deshler