SonicChicken blog

The second meet of Caitlin's 2006 gymastics season was "School Days" held last Saturday afternoon at Golden Gate Gymnastics in Concord, California.

This was Caitlin's first event at GGG, and I thought they ran a great meet! In spite of the rather small gym, there was plenty of room for spectators and gymnasts. (It may have helped that we were in the final session, since one of the earlier attendees told me that the morning and afternoon sessions had many more gymnasts.) During the late session there were about 10-15 girls per event, so the competition floor wasn't very crowded. I assume that the meet organizers would want to keep the earlier sessions maxed out. Thus the final session can run "light" and finish as quickly as possible, so the meet staff can start cleanup ASAP. Perhaps we should request the final session in the future?

Caitlin medaled in every event this weekend. She took second place on the uneven bars and fifth place on vault, beam and floor; however, between her very good score on bars and her consistent finishes in the other events, she managed to pull third place overall.

Continue reading 'School Days 2006'

Caitlin began her level 5 gymnastic season last Sunday at the 2006 Judges Cup held at Sac State. This was her first meet as a member of Pozsar’s Gymnastics team.

We were up against some stiff competition in our session: Airborne and San Mateo Gymnastics always do very well. I was unfamiliar with Central Coast Gymnastics, the final squad in our session, and they had only one athlete in Caitlin’s age group so I didn’t get to see much of them.

Trudi, Pozsar’s head coach, was a bit worried that our girls would lose points for wearing a sleeveless leotard to a meet, but a new athlete joined our team a few weeks ago and she hasn’t received the team’s competition leotard yet. We didn’t want to exclude our newest team member, so everybody wore their tiger leo’s and we took the deduction for our non-standard uniforms.

Caitlin was still feeling a bit of jetlag after her return from Sweden last week. (I’ll write about the Sweden trip later.) She didn’t rank very well in her session, even though her scores were actually pretty good:

I believe a score of 32.000 is enough to qualify for Zone finals, so I’d say 32.525 isn’t bad at all!

Caitlin and her teammates, getting some last-minute instruction from Trudi. Left to right: Cassie, Alyssa, Caitlin, and coach Trudi.

I think all the girls were a little disappointed with their rankings, but they were up against some really good teams. It’s a bit disheartening to start the season this way, but they seem to be bouncing back and working very hard in practice this last week. I’m looking forward to watching Caitlin and all the rest of Pozsar’s gymnasts throughout the season. We have some great meets to look forward to, but I’ll have to write about the upcoming schedule in a follow-on post. For now, I’ll close with a group picture of the whole team:

Left to right, front row first: Tori, Carly, Megan; Alyssa, Caitlin, Cassie, Marci; coaches Nicole and Trudi.

Caitlin, my youngest, competed in her first gymnastics competition last weekend (2005-08-27), Judges’ Cup 2005. The meet was hosted by Technique Gymnastics at the CSUS gymnasium, which has no air conditioning. Fortunately the weather wasn’t nearly as hot as it often is in Sacramento in late August–only 38 °C, when it could easily have been 42 °C! (Those 4 degrees make a big difference, trust me.)

Caitlin took 3^rd place on beam and 6^th overall in her division. She did pretty well considering that she had sliced her hand open two days before. Also, I think she was a little intimidated by performing in front of judges and all the spectators, because she made a couple of mistakes that I haven’t seen from her for months, if not years. Understandable given that this was her first meet. Even so, she’s already qualified to progress to zone in post-season. Yeah, Caitlin!

The lighting in the gym was terrible and no flash photography was allowed. (Not that a flash would have done any good–I couldn’t get close enough to the events for it to make a difference.) Even so, I managed to get a few shots that weren’t completely ruined by overlong exposures and funky lighting. Continue reading ‘Caitlin’s first gym meet’