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Sophomore Alicia Hatcher

Alicia Hatcher's Gymnastics Journal

Sophomore talks about the recent meet with Nebraska

Jan. 31, 2007

The past week was a great week for Tiger gymnastics! We had our second home meet of the year against Nebraska and scored our highest team score of the season even though we didn't beat the Cornhuskers. Overall the meet on Friday went very well, highlighted by three personal bests by two Tiger athletes.

Warm-ups went pretty well and I remember coming out in the arena before we marched out thinking, "Wow, there are a lot of people here!" It's always exciting to see a bunch of people in the stands to cheer you on, so that sight was a great beginning for us.

Vault went extremely well for us. We scored our highest event total of the night, with a 48.95. We had one fall there, but the rest of the girls hit, so we didn't have to count it. It was pretty cool because Nebraska scored a 49.00 on bars, so when the first rotation scores were announced, we were just a half tenth behind a team that finished fifth at NCAA's last year!

Bars also went well. We also had one fall early in lineup, but the rest of the bar team hit, so we were good to go. I think the biggest place we get deductions are handstands. If we don't get completely vertical on casts or skills that are supposed to land in a handstand, it's a deduction. This week we will continue to work on these so we can get the highest scores possible.

We moved on to beam, where we did significantly better than last week. We had two girls fall, which means we had to count a fall, but I think these are easy fixes. Beam is an event that you just really have to put your nerves aside and pretend like its practice. Sounds easy...especially when you're on an event that is four inches wide, you've got 15 other teammates counting on you and an arena full of fans. :)

On a personal note, my beam routine only had a start value of a 9.8 due to a rule that you must have a "C" valued jump in your leap series. We weren't aware of this until after the meet, but it's kind of funny that I had competed this exact routine the weekend before and had no trouble at all. I guess I'm just glad we found this out now and not later in the season when it really matters.

Finally, floor also went very well. We are all getting more comfortable with our routines and landings. I think we could all improve even a little more by cleaning up form and the overall presentation of our routines. However, I am extremely proud of everyone on the team at this meet and at all of our previous meets.

As a team, everyone can hit all of their routines, extremely well too! It's just that we all need to hit on the same day. When we do this I have no doubt that we will be very pleased with the outcome in our scores and in the rankings. We will travel on Thursday to compete this Friday at Iowa State...GO TIGERS!!!

Hatch

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