Weekly diary by Valorie Kondos Field, head coach for UCLA's women's gymnastics team.
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March 1, 2004
After a very rough start Friday night up in Washington with three consecutive falls on bars, we were able to smooth things out and compete well. It's always a fear that the dreaded downward spiral will catch hold and the entire evening will be a rough one. I was glad to see our athletes not fall into the "What's going on?" state, but instead step up to "Whatever's going on, it stops right now."
It was exciting to have Kisha Auld back in the vault lineup. Even though her score was a little bit below what we'd like to have for our championship season, her competitiveness is so exciting to have on the competition floor. She's one of those athletes who steps it up a notch in competition, even though she hasn't competed in over four years, and the highest level she achieved before coming to UCLA was Level 8. She certainly LOVES to compete in the college scene. We are looking to Kisha to be a great asset to our vault and floor teams in the future.
The plan for Kristen Maloney this weekend was to have her compete in just a few events, but she ended up stepping in for Jamie Dantzscher and competing in the all-around (Jamie was out with a sinus infection but will hopefully be back this coming weekend). Although Kristen had an uncharacteristic fall on bars, she stepped it up the rest of the meet with the best vault and beam performances she's had all season. She also competed her double layout for the first time this season on floor. The excitement of seeing her back competing actually gets stronger with every meet she's in.
While our entire team did a great job staying on track this meet, it certainly wasn't one of our stellar "firing on all cylinder" evenings. If we are speaking metaphorically about the "ebb and flow" of a season: Ebb meaning (1. ) the outward movement of the tide. (2.) the condition of lowness or decline, we were definitely in an ebb sort of state and are looking to our next 7 competitions to pick up the "flow". In fact, a Tsunami would be nice right around April 16th.
We are all looking forward to our last regular season home meet this Sunday against Michigan. We're hoping to compete all of our seven seniors in their last regular season appearance in Pauley. Senior night is always such a special event. Please join us in honoring Christy Erickson, Trishna Patel, Jamie Williams, Kristen Maloney, Yvonne Tousek, Jeanette Antolin and Jamie Dantzscher.
Great to be a Bruin!
~miss val