Head coach
We closed our season at the University of Pittsburgh on March 15. While we finished second, we feel like we performed well enough to win the meet. We hit 24 out of 24 routines, but unfortunately we left a couple of little things out there right at the end. We didn’t win, but we were very pleased with the teams performance and how we carried ourselves.
It isn’t easy to refocus after an emotional meet like the one we had a week earlier when we secured the Mid-American Conference regular-season championship against Bowling Green in our last home meet. We struggled a little bit in warmups at Pittsburgh. They just kind of looked like they were going through the motions, so we had a little talk to refocus before the meet. We talked about how last week was high emotion, how it was senior night and the regular-season championship. But now that’s over with. We still have other things we have to accomplish starting today.
To the credit of our athletes, they proved us wrong. You love to see that. It’s fun. After not looking great in warm ups, they responded great.
Now we move on to the Mid-American Conference Championships in Ypsilanti, Mich.
We’ve talked a lot about not putting anything extra into this meet. If we start trying harder, then we can struggle. This team has done well taking it one meet at a time and not working any different because it is a bigger meet. We have to still go out and do our same routines. Let’s just go out and be consistent.
Gymnastics isn’t like other sports where you may want to pump yourself up. If you go out there too pumped up, you usually screw up. That adrenalin in our sport is sometimes not a good thing.
In preparation for going to Ypsilanti, we will take things down to a bare minimum. We will often have kids working on different events even if they will not be competing in all of them. Now we take out all of the extras. We’ll get them working on a couple of routines on each event every day and get them out a little earlier than normal. After practicing Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday will be a travel day for us. Friday will be a warm-up out there and then Saturday is the competition.
To win we will have to go out and hit our routines and stick the dismounts. There are lots of little tenths you can gain or lose by sticking landings on bars, beam and vault. Probably the team that sticks the most will be the team that wins. It’s something we will focus on a little more this week even though we talk about it all the time. You can do a great routine, but yet when you take a step on the dismount, you are starting from a tenth lower than everyone else. Those teams that stick, after five kids they basically count a fall by not sticking a landing.
Here is a look back at some of our routines from last week's meet at Pittsburgh:
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