Disappointing Finish

Last year Ali’s team had a great warm-up for the Nationals competition at Disney with a big 1^st place finish at the Brookfield Blast.  This year was quite a different story.  They took 4^th out of the four teams competing in their division.  Not a very inspiring finish heading into Nationals next week.

I will say that their performance left a little something to be desired.  One girl missed a bunch of her moves and another girl shorted one of her tumbling moves so I am pretty confident that they didn’t deserve to finish first.  However, one of the other teams fell three times during their routine, and I would have put them on the same level as our girls.  They finished 2^nd.  The third place team was very generic and uninspiring.  It was a pretty simple routine, and I don’t know how they finished ahead of Ali’s team with such a simple routine.

One of the problems was that one of the girls suffered a concussion in the week leading up to the competition, so they had to have another girl step in and learn her part in two days of practice.  But she wasn’t the reason for the flubs.  Personally, I don’t think the one girl who fell is very good.  I think that she is told she is good by her parents, and she doesn’t listen to her coach (but that is just my opinion).  The girl who cut her tumbling apparently possibly has a concussion as well.  She hit her head late last week, and is dealing with headaches, but she still competed.  Because of this, there seems to be some discord running thru the team right now, which is just not good since they are competing at Disney in a week.  Unfortunately, is isn’t inspiring any confidence in getting to the semi-finals this year.  I hope the girls can pull things together, but I am not sure what their chances are going to be.