Spent a couple days in Indianapolis Indiana this weekend for the Circle of Stars gymnastics competition. This is a huge meet, about 3000 girls competing. This year they had to move their venue because of this years Super Bowl. They were setting stuff up the whole time we were there. The hotel we were staying at, the JW Marriott, had a image of the Lombardi trophy being put on the front of the build. It went from almost the first floor to the top floor. The hotel was awesome, I have never had a corner room that both walls were made of all glass. It was a great view.
A couple of my girls were competing on Saturday night and they were heading up to Indy on Friday night. On their way there was a big ice storm and they were stuck in Vandailia, IL all night waiting for the highway to reopen. One of the girls had to sleep in her car. It was not a good situation for girls looking to have great competitions the next day. On my way up the next day we counted 25 separate accident sites, some looked like the people involved did not survive. Most of the vehicles on the side were semi trucks, there were a few with cargo scattered all over the highway, some were upside down, and some were so far off the road I don't know how they got there. It was really sort of ere, it made me think of the images from when I was a kid of the bombed out cars and trucks in Iraq when Saddam's men were fleeing Saudi Arabia.
Both athletes ended up doing well. The girl who spent the night in her car is still coming back from a back injury and did as well as we hoped she would. Our other athlete hit 3 out of 4 events only missing her one event that we had upgraded a lot for this meet. Not only did this one spend two days traveling to the meet though, she also has bronchitis or something like that and was half dead the whole time. So all things considering, I have to be happy about how they did. This morning I had another group of 8 girls competing. All these girls have been training really hard and were looking pretty prepared for this meet, so my assistant coach and I were pretty excited for this weekend. It was a pretty good meet hitting at least 75% of all our routines. This might not sound great but for this time of the year it is. Last year I remember missing almost every bar routine at this meet.
The one really bad thing at the meet was I had one athlete get injured. It was so strange, she was warming up her bar dismount, landed perfectly and when she was walking away she said she felt like she just "tweaked" her back. A couple minutes later she was crying and this girls does not cry, or I have never seen her cry. We ended up having to scratch her from the rest of the meet which really sucks as she is one of our best gymnasts. She is okay, but her back spasmed so bad that she just froze up. Turns out she has been dealing with a sciatic nerve problem and we didn't know about it. When she landed it must have moved something wrong and it flared up bad. I hope she is back quick though. In the end this group ended up placing 2nd as a team. That is a great result for us in such a big meet so early in the year. I am starting to feel like we are on the right track and we are going to do some awesome stuff coming up.
Our next three meets are all in town competitions, and then we go to Minnesota, and then our state championships. The season is going to go really fast now, in no time I will be racing at Froze Toes, then State, then I'll be out at the USA gymnastics National Championships, and it will be done like that. Time flies when you are having fun.
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