By Brice Biggin
Head coach
We learned this weekend that we have kids with a lot of heart.
Our team has been a bit down and out this year with injuries and illness, and then we had a kid come down with pneumonia and another get in a car accident right before our meet at Central Michigan. We scrambled for a lineup and had to add some kids in who had never done what they did before this past weekend.
We were outgunned coming in. There is no doubt about it. Central Michigan is a very good team and we respect that. But our kids showed a tremendous amount of heart with the ability to not give in to the crowd or to the moment. We couldn’t be more proud of them and more proud of the victory.
When you look at faces, they don’t usually lie. You can see fear. You can see doubt. You can see lack of confidence in the way an athlete stares at you or talks to you. I didn’t see any of that this weekend.
As we were warming up on beam, which was our last event, Central Michigan was creeping back into it quickly. They had some fans in the front few rows who were doing some heckling. I talked to the team and said “listen, we are not going to be able to hold your hand through this. It is time to grow up now. You are going to face situations like this when you have a crowd that may not be the most polite and is trying to do things to get you off of your game. The only way to handle that is to go out and make routines. If you do that, it’ll take care of everything.”
I saw all of our kids nod their heads.
I don’t pull a lot of punches with our kids. They know I am very honest. Marie Case was up last for us and I told her very simply – “the season is on you right now. You need to go out and make this routine. If you want to win a regular-season championship, you have to make a routine.”
She got this little smile on her face. I told her I didn’t care which routine she does. She can either do a back handspring layout-stepout or a back handspring layout-stepout layout-stepout, which is very difficult and more than she needed to do. But that’s Marie.
Marie has such a strong belief in herself because of the way she trains. She trains harder than anyone else and with more consistency than anyone else. She has a fierce determination that she is not going to fail. She is not going to let anyone else down or herself down. She is one of those rare individuals who has such an intensity about her that I’m going to cry the day she leaves. It is going to be impossible to replace her.
It rubs off. I think when Marie’s teammates watch her compete the way she does it builds confidence and it settles down people. Beam is a tough event, and to finish on it in a venue like that and in that kind of setting was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever seen a team do.
There were some other special moments.
Our first bar routine went up and had a major mistake right at the end of her routine. She was in a good routine and had about three steps in her landing. We started out with a 9.55 which is not a good score. That had me worried. Our next kid up, Amiah Mims, had only competed on bars once all year. She has a really nice routine, but it has been a little inconsistent.
When Amiah went to do her release, she was a little far from the bar. When she turned, she reached, and I mean she reached with a purpose that there was no way she was coming off of the bar. That was one of the key things that really started the whole ball rolling for us. Not only did she get back to the bar on her release, but she has struggled with her double layout dismount, and she did it beautifully and stuck the landing. It jumped the scores up and the next kids relaxed a bit and went out and did their job. That was a key spot for us because if she made a mistake, things could have turned everything completely the other way.
Another moment that sticks out for me was on vault. The girl who made the mistake on bars earlier, Kelsey Lawless, was also in the vault lineup for the first time doing a new vault. We needed her, and she did a great job. I told her before that she owed us one. She knew. She accepted it and she did a fantastic job of doing a big vault when we needed it.
When Central Michigan made some mistakes on bars that hurt them. They needed to play catchup and they just ran out of time.
After the win we stayed at No. 25, but this away score is going to help us. If we can have another good away score this weekend at Ball State, I think we can jump up a little bit. We have some good teams right in front of us like Central Michigan, Ohio State, Washington and North Carolina State.
These away scores are a premium because you have to count three of them. If you are a really good home team, but you can’t compete on the road, you are not going to be very successful. That’s why we’ve really pushed being consistent on the road. This win at Central Michigan set us up both for the rankings and the regular-season championship. We still have a lot of work for that, too. We are enjoying the moment now, but come Tuesday when we get back into practice we have to bust our butts because we have another step we need to take if we want to win a regular-season championship.
No comments:
Post a Comment