Junior Nikki Bowman
  
 
Nikki Bowman's Gymnastics Journal

The junior talks about the Cat Classic

March 5, 2007

Hi everyone!

Every year I look forward to our annual Cat Classic competition and this year wasn't any different! I know our entire team looks forward to having a huge home crowd and getting after a good solid team score. I especially was looking forward to this meet because it was my first time in my three years at Mizzou that I have been healthy and prepared enough to compete and actually help my team get our high score of the season (thus far :o).

The first night of competition, the team and all-around portion of the meet, was filled with a lot of excitement while four teams were simultaneously competing. We started on vault and did well enough to qualify our entire vault lineup to event finals. Moving on to bars, the bar team did a great job to keep the scores up when we had a very unexpected fall mid-lineup. Without counting a fall, we then went to beam where we again, hit five solid beam routines. I was especially excited to exhibition and gain my confidence back from a rocky beam season. We ended the night on floor and definitely wanted to give our fans a great show. Everyone nailed their routines and we tallied our team results to a season high of 196.075 and the Cat Classic team title.

Even though we may have wanted to go celebrate our team performance that Friday night, most of us had another night of competition the following night. Prior to finals, we had our annual Cat Classic Banquet in the Clinton Club at Mizzou Arena. Generally our families attend the lunch banquet along with each of the four team's coaches. Since my family lives so far away, my boyfriend, the place kicker for Mizzou football, escorted me to the banquet (thank you, Jeff ;o). After the banquet was over, we had to quickly get pretty for the meet and head to the training room.

The top 10 scores on each event during the team round go onto the event finals. This being my first Cat Classic performance, I realized exactly how much I have become dependent on the support of my teammates. Since the majority of the team was in at least one event, everyone was spread out around the arena and I definitely missed everyone standing and cheering right there next to me. Even though I did not end up placing in the vault final, Mizzou gymnasts took three out of the four event titles in the finals competition and made the fans, coaches and teammates proud.

After the long weekend, we got a much needed break on Sunday, but we were back in the gym on Monday to try to improve on our great performance at the Cat Classic!

Nikki Bowman

 

 

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