What a weekend! We are the 2010 Big Ten Champions! Wow, that is fun to write! Sometimes people congratulate the senior class on this year’s team and say, “This is your fourth one, so you must be getting use to it.” Well that is just not true! Every Big Ten Championship is something special!  I couldn’t be more proud of how our team performed.  We all competed solely for Michigan with such pride and confidence in each other.

More specifically, the freshmen performed phenomenally.  They have been competing like veterans for us all year long.  Sometimes the nerves can be overwhelming at a meet of this magnitude, but they didn’t let it affect them one bit.  This is a very promising sign for our future goals! Sarah also had an outstanding all-around performance, especially leading things off for us on the balance beam. We are so lucky to have such an amazing gymnast get us started on that event; she definitely set the tone for FOUR 9.9 performances.

I couldn’t be more proud of last weekend. I could go on and on about each gymnast’s performance, and tell you how proud I am of each and every single one of us. But the truth is, our team has decided to compartmentalize that excitement of our Big Ten victory.  We are tucking it away for now, so we can focus on our upcoming meet in West Virginia.  We plan to carry the same energy and level of confidence that we have developed from these last two season high performances into our Regional competition.

Thanks for your support.  (The Michigan cheering section at Big Ten’s was absolutely wonderful.  I hope you all know, you are such a large part of our success!) 

Go Blue! 

Kelsey

What a great weekend, right?!  After giving a great performance and defeating the Georgia Gym Dogs this past Friday, our whole team is very pumped up and ready to tackle the remaining meets left in our season.

Aside from celebrating the victory on Friday night, we also celebrated our beloved seniors after the meet.  We invited friends and family to the Marriot Hotel to have some pizza and put on a goofy activity for our seniors.  First, we had the seniors sit on the couch in the center of the lobby and put on a silly hat that represented something about them.  For example, Mo wore a hat with cats on it because she loves her cat dearly, and Jackie wore a hat with candy all over because she loves the sweets.  Then we had a list of questions the seniors had to answer, and for each question they got wrong they had to put a piece of gum in their mouth and make an animal sound.  It was a great way to have a little fun with the seniors for their last home meet.

This upcoming weekend we are heading to Alabama, and the team can’t wait to be in some warm weather and show the Crimson Tide what we’ve got! We are at the point in our season where we are fine tuning everything and putting the main focus on quality compared to quantity. Everyone is looking great in the gym and showing the confidence
we need to succeed in post season!

Go Blue!

Trish

I hope everyone is enjoying the gorgeous spring weather!  I know we are!  Last week, we were on spring break and had a great time relaxing in Ann Arbor.  Natalie, Brittnee, and I had a “freshman team bonding” night where we painted the rock on campus to advertise and get pumped up for our meet against Penn State.  On Thursday, Bev treated us to a spa day instead of practice.  It was such a nice surprise and I think everyone benefited from relaxing in the hot tubs at the Oasis.  On Sunday, we competed at Penn State.  Although we had a few mistakes, we still ended up with a great road score and several season highs.  Everyone was excited about how well we performed on vault, counting three 9.9’s and two 9.85’s.  Beam was decidedly one of our strongest performances of the night, and it definitely boosted our beam team’s confidence.  We were so proud to be able to make such a great comeback, posting our season high of 49.375. 

This week we have been working hard in the gym to improve our consistency and stick our landings.  We are ready to take on Georgia this Friday, as it is senior night and our last home meet of the season.  Hope to see you all at 7:00 at Crisler! 

GO BLUE!

Katie

This week over spring break the team has been gearing up for our meet against Penn State. 

The rivalry between Michigan and Penn State makes this meet really exciting every season, and this year I think we are
extra fired up to take on those Nittany Lions!  To help prepare for the competition we yelled PSU cheers during the last day of beam practice this week.  Despite the distractions the beam girls looked rock solid, so I know we will be great on Sunday! 

Today when we walked into the gym we were all surprised by some decorations that had been put on the wall.  There is a countdown until Nationals, as well as drawn stairs, with each step representing each meet left in the season.  As the drawing suggests, our goal is to keep improving and climbing from now until the end of April.  It is cool to have those
decorations in the gym as a daily reminder of what we want and are working hard to achieve.

Go Blue!

Mo

I hope everybody is enjoying the pretty snow outside! The meet this past weekend against Utah was awesome and it gave us a lot of confidence. Even though we won, we have yet to reach our full potential and we are going to show everyone just that this weekend at Illinois. Everyone is looking really great in the gym this week too, which is awesome. One person we are excited to see tumbling again is Kari Pearce. Her routine is coming along very nicely. We also can’t wait for Spring Break that is coming up next week. It will be really nice to just practice, relax, and hang out without worrying about school and being on a tight schedule. 

GO BLUE!!!

Jackie

Well we are officially entering into the second half of our season, which is always the most exciting part.  Last weekend we competed against Minnesota at home.  It was so nice to be able to be competing in Crisler again after three weeks on the road.  We had quite a large crowd, which definitely helped with our energy and excitement.  Overall we had a good meet and saw improvements in a lot of areas.  We’re focusing this coming week on beam and trying to get more consistent on that event, so some different and fun assignments are sure to be in store.  In other news, this morning we had another couple inches of snow on the ground.  Nothing compared to the DC area, but definitely another reminder that it is wintertime here in beautiful Ann Arbor. 

This week we take on the Utes from the University of Utah.  It is the first of the next 5 meets that features a team that was at NCAA Championships last year, so we are ready to rise to the occasion and show some great routines. I hope to see you all at Crisler Arena at 7:30 this Friday! 

As always, GO BLUE!

 Sarah

So this is Taylor and Kari here! We decided to give you a double team talk this time and get you updated with our last two weeks. Two weekends ago, we had an away meet at Iowa State – the home of Kelsey Knutson. And we finally hit a full meet, 23 for 23 routines! After two meets with frustrating beam rotations, it was awesome to have everyone hit beam. You could just feel the relief and excitement that was going on after that awesome beam rotation! What made that meet even better was we had our own Michigan section there because of the huge crowd Kelsey brought in with her family and friends from the area.

 Iowa State was a great step to our climb to the end of the season. It was then back to the gym for 3 quick days then we were on the road again to West Virginia.

This past weekend we were in Morgantown, West Virginia in a tri meet with West Virginia University and William and Mary.  This was another great stepping stone this season.  Despite the small crowd and being an away meet, we kept the energy up and did some great gymnastics.  We scored a season high of a 196.4 and this helped to move us up to 13^th in the country.  There were many great performances, though we still have a few areas that we can improve. 

Though it was a great meet, we had to stay there an extra day due to the snow storm because the Pittsburg airport was closed on Saturday.  Many of us took advantage of the extra time to study, enjoy the hot tub, play euchre, watch TV, and just chill out.   

This Saturday we will be back at Crisler for the first time in three weeks to take on the Minnesota Gophers.  We hope to see you there!! GO BLUE!!

Kari and Taylor

We stayed at the Embassy Suites and were able to have enough down time for some team bonding. We had a movie night, watched the Time Travelers Wife, and also had some time after the meet to sit in the hot tub and relax our bodies. It was an early flight back to Ann Arbor this morning and now it’s back to business. We have two days of practice this week to crack down and focus on fixing the mistakes we’ve had. We are going to show up confident and strong this weekend for our meet against Iowa State. I think this is going to be another good meet that will be tough but we are more than ready to stand up to the challenge. We are going to have to step it up and we will show everybody how strong of a team we really are this year.

Have a great week!

Get it Blue!

Brittnee

See you tomorrow, fans!

GO BLUE!
Natalie

The team has been back on campus since the 28th training, but everyone enjoyed their week off. Almost everyone traveled home to spend the holidays with their families, except for me! I went and visited my boyfriend’s family in Pennsylvania and then went to Florida to be with my family for the rest of my break.

Since we have been on campus with no classes to keep us busy, we have found plenty of activities to occupy our time. Brittnee, Katie, and Natalie stayed at my house (Trish, Kari, and Mo live here too ) because the dorms were closed over break. Let’s just say the living room looked 500 times better once they moved back into the dorms.  :) We watched probably two movies a day, one of which was the “Hannah Montana” Movie. There is a scene in this movie where she teaches the crowd a “Hoedown Throwdown” so, being the little girls we are, we all learned the dance! It was like a slumber party! The next day at the gym we taught all of the girls that weren’t at our house the dance for our warm-up!! One night we had a team dinner at Red Robin and went to the movie theater and watched “It’s Complicated.” Funny movie!

In the gym all of the girls look great! We are so pumped for this coming weekend for our home opener against Iowa and Bowling Green! We had an “in-gym” intrasquad last Friday with real judges to get us ready for this weekend. Our line-ups looked solid. We brought the energy and it definitely got us excited to start the season off!

Another point I would like to mention is how great our team finished last semester academically. We were very proud of our average GPA and are challenging ourselves to achieve higher this winter semester. Classes started today, so everything is back to a normal schedule for us!

I can’t wait to see everyone this weekend at Crisler!! Yay!
LET’S GO BLUE!!!

Kylee