The big goal

I gave the girls a big goal the other day. In any consecutive 7 day period, if they are able to put together an 80% hit percentage I will buy them a pizza party and frozen yogurt. Nothing gets these girls motivated like food. For me and a lot of the coaches I know it is not how high an athlete scores during the year, it is how often they hit their routines. This is because that is what these girls can control, no one can control the score.

I was thinking about scores the other day and how much prestige is put on judges in the sport. The funny thing is I don't know a single judge that that's what they DO. They all have jobs and judging is a hobby, or something they do because they love gymnastics. Yet we as coaches, parents, or athletes look to them for all the answers.

It is the coaches though that spend all their time in the gym, learning the skills, the routines, and the requirements. We know how a skill should be done, or how a skill can be done. I don't know how infuriating it is when a judge tells me how a skill should be done and they are wrong. A lot of the time they are wrong about skills that they don't see often and don't get reviewed in their meetings. There have been times over the years when the technique of certain skills have been changed because judges have it wrong. Mostly it has been when girls start to do skills that men were doing and don't use the same technique. For the most part men always have technique pretty well figured out by the time a skill gets to the girls. Why not use what they have taken so much time to figure out.

My desire to be on the bike is really starting to ramp up. I spent over 3 hours on the trainer today and only the last 10 min of my 2.5 hour tempo interval was tough. I did watch some Grey's Anatomy that Katie had rented from Blockbuster. That helped a lot, sometimes the bike races get a little boring on the long stretches before guys really start racing.

My teammate Rob got the blog part of QMC's webpage up and running today. Check it out, Matt James and Rob will be getting it all going really soon.

http://quantummesacycles.com/blog/

This is the site of the meet my gymnastics team hosts at the Double Tree in Chesterfield. Before setup.

We have to put plastic on the ground to protect the tennis courts from chalk. We are lucky to get an army of kids who need volunteer hours to lay this stuff out.

This is the final setup. There are 3 girls gym and one boys gym. We had 1500 kid competing in here and over 5000 spectators running though here. And for the first year we charged no admissions. It was a huge success.