Weekly diary by Valorie Kondos Field, head coach for UCLA's women's gymnastics team.
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Note: With three NCAA titles in six years, UCLA head coach Valorie Kondos Field has positioned her Bruins as the premier program in collegiate gymnastics. Not only has she consistently recruited the top talent in the world, but she has produced the results. In the past seven years alone, Kondos Field has led UCLA to three NCAA titles and one runner-up finish, six Regional titles and four Pac-10 championships.
February 4, 2003
We just finished Week 5 of our competition season, and some great things happened at our home meet.
• First and foremost, Coach Wooden and his daughter and son-in-law joined us. It's amazing how the air seems to sparkle in Pauley Pavilion when Coach Wooden is around.
• It was great fun having Mark Cook back in town. As I'm sure all of you know, Mark is now the co-head coach, with his wife Rene, of the Arkansas Lady Razorbacks. Mark was an assistant coach here when we won our first national championship in 1997 and is a dear friend.
• It must have been a Bruin cosmic weekend because a lot of alumni came to the meet, including many I haven't seen in years. Mark and Chris Caso, Mitch Gaylord, Anne Dixon, Carmen Tausend, and Lena Degteva were among the blast from the past in attendance. Most of them had their spouses and children with them, which made the Bruin family experience that much fuller.
• From a competitive stand-point, we met before the meet and talked about everyone stepping it up a notch to make up for Jamie Dantzscher not being in the line-up. We also talked about it being the time of season where we start fine-tuning. It was exciting to see our athletes pay a little more attention to detail, which resulted in some beautiful "performances".
• It was also nice to hit 23 for 23 routines with tremendous confidence. It was great fun having back-to-back 10's on floor with the performances of Kate Richardson and Onnie Willis. And I can confidently say that every Bruin on the floor and in the stands was ecstatic for Yvonne Tousek, who earned a 10.0 on bars, the first 10.0 of her collegiate career. Yvi doesn't smile much in competitions, so it was heartwarming to see her smile ear to ear when her score went up!
We look forward to a jam-packed weekend coming up. We compete on Friday at Stanford, then at home on Sunday against Washington. We hope to compete as much of our starting line-up as possible for both meets. However, we've got quite a few ankle issues which may determine our line-up at one or both meets.
I would say that "DETERMINED" is an accurate and precise depiction of our team's demeanor this season.
Until next week,
miss val