April 11, 2007

Check out all of the Illini Ink entries from this season

Get behind the scenes of Illinois Gymnastics with Illini Ink - the weekly women's gymnastics journal. This week, sophomore Julie Crall talks about the Easter holiday, and the upcoming Regional meet.

Hey Illini Fans!

Coming off an exhilarating weekend at Penn State, we kept the momentum going with lots of energy and enthusiasm in the gym this past week. The great finish at Big Ten's reminded us of our potential to finish in one of the top slots at our Regional meet this weekend in Arizona! We were motivated and prepared to work our hardest for the upcoming weeks.

This past week served as a significant adjustment to our normal routine as the first weekend since January to not have a competition. Instead, we put in four productive practice days working on perfecting our routines even further. Unfortunately, our coach, Mazza, got very ill towards to end of the week and was forced to miss a couple practices. But, to both Mel's and my delight, we got to take over as beam coaches and judge the girls' "score day." Currently being injured, it certainly made our day!

Due to our strong performance at Big Ten's, Coach Bob rewarded us with both Saturday and Sunday off! Of course, we were all ecstatic because it was Easter weekend and many of us chose to go home for the weekend. It was nice to return to our hometowns, spend some quality time with our families, and have a short break from schoolwork and gymnastics. But, by the end of the weekend, we all were ready to come back, missing each others' company and looking forward to the exciting week ahead! The girls who stayed in Champaign had an enjoyable weekend as well, putting together an Easter egg hunt and Easter dinner.

Now, with the NCAA regional meet quickly approaching this weekend, we could not be more excited. We found out this past week that we will be facing five other teams, including Stanford, Oregon State, Arizona, Arizona State, and University of Illinois-Chicago in Arizona. Along with this, we also discovered our competitive order for the competition. We were pleased to find out that we will be starting on beam, the same rotation that we had at Big Ten's! Considering we had good luck with that rotation at our last meet; our team is confident that it will work to our advantage once again this weekend.

Well, thanks for reading and I hope you watch as we make our ILLINI imprint this weekend in sunny Arizona!

Go Illini!
Julie