D had gymnastics last Saturday. Their first year most the coaches are just trying to get them to remember the whole routines – boys have even more events that girls: floor, parallel bars, high bar, rings, vault and pommel horse. It’s a lot to remember with tons of chaos and people watching. D’s been having a tough year. When nervous, he goes into class clown mode, which isn’t very conducive to the precision required in gymnastics. He gets through his routines but forget to point his toes or he doesn’t hold for 3 seconds.
Saturday he got 5th place on pommel horse. Very, very cool. It was a huge meet too. All the boys teams from Arizona, three from New Mexico and one from Mexico! Hopefully this will put some of the fun back in it for him. He was getting frustrated getting such low scores when in his mind he was doing the whole routine; he just couldn’t see the difference between arms at a 30 degree angle versus 45, for instance. Next weekend is the state meet. He’s happy to have the season done. He loves practice, which is year round, running around with the guys, having a good time; but he’s ready to have the competition season over. One more meet and then off until next November.
[VIDEO COMING SOONISH!]
It took so long to get the video edited that the last meet came today before I got the last draft published. The state meet was today. On the very yeah side, he got his highest scores yet on floor and vault; unfortunately he totally missed his landings on parallel bars and high bars. Oh well, sometimes everyone forgets their sticky feet for good landings. They had a big board for all around scores. He was bouncing between 6th and 11th for most of the meet – not bad at all for state. He was a little disappointed to fall off the board with his last two events. I liked the fact that at the end they stood up and told them all they should be proud to have made it through the competition season. I remember my first day of practice when he’d moved up to the competitive level. One of the mothers said, “This isn’t little league.” It seemed a strange comment at the time – elitist, snobbish, looking down on other sports. But after only one season, I can agree that it is definitely different than most team sports. Starting at 6, 7, 8 years old these kids practice five or six hours a week, year round. When they are competing, while they are part of a team, they are very much alone out there being judged and scored.
While he is ready for competition to be over and to go back to learning new skills and just having fun, I hope he is proud of himself for all the effort he put in this year and sees all the improvement.
