Big Day Tomorrow

Tomorrow marks the start of the competitive year for my girl's gymnastics team. It is a pretty big deal for our lower level athletes, especially our level 7 girls. It will be the first time they do their new optional floor routines with their own music and their own beam routines. Bars ends up being pretty compulsory still as well as vault. The reason we do it is to get the cob webs cleared out for the girls and how to compete. We bring in a couple of judges which makes it feel more like a real meet and a big group of parents come in to watch.

For the girls I work with (level 9 and 10) this is really just a reminder of what competing is like. These kids are some of the most worried about tomorrow. As they came up through the ranks of the team they had always had an easy time of competing at their highest ability. Now at this level though, that doesn't happen. Getting used to this is tough. It has been a struggle to get my girls to understand that it takes time to peak and the time to do that is almost 6 months from now. My assistant coach and I have been trying to tell these girls that we just expect them to try hard and be good roll models for the younger kids. We know what is going to happen tomorrow. It is going to be a tough day for our highest level kids. It is funny that I feel like our kids are looking better than ever but we are still not ready to kill it this weekend. I guess if we were, I might be a little concerned. One of my athletes is going to do her last year's bar routine this weekend. Her new routine isn't quite ready and I want her to have something to do. So when I told her, she thought about it and said she couldn't believe how easy that routine was, and how last year she thought it was supper hard. It's fun to be there when the girls have thoughts like that and I hope that she starts to look at other skills like she saw her old routine.

Tomorrow is also a big meeting for Quantum Mesa Cycles. The team has grown a lot since we first formed it a couple months ago but we are still within our goal of being a small elite team. When we agreed to basically become the Mesa Cycles team we said that we would invite most of the old Mesa team. That is how most of our growth has come over the last few weeks. The best part about it though is that we picked up all people filling categories, age groups, or disciplines that we did not have people in.

Everyone is really excited about the meeting though and we are planning to do an easy training ride on Sunday morning. Not everyone will be at either get together, but most people will. And when you are working with so many people, it is hard to expect perfection. I'm excited to see everyone, and meet the new members.

This is going to be a great year for both my gym, and my race team. Pretty cool that both are kicking off tomorrow.