Nov. 8, 2007
Get behind the scenes of Illinois Gymnastics with Illini Ink - the weekly women's gymnastics journal. In this week's edition, junior Kim Kruk talks about Coach Mazza's niece, the recent inter-squad meet and the countdown to Mixed Pairs.
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Hey Illini Fans!!
Wow. I can't believe Thanksgiving Break is only 2 weeks away! This year has been going by incredibly fast. School has been keeping us all really busy. With exams, projects, and papers we all have, I know most of us can't wait for our week long break from school. Also, with the beginning of November, comes the start of cooler weather, and Mazza (Coach Kim) reminds us to bundle up so we don't get sick. Speaking of Mazza, her sister just had a baby girl on Monday night!! When we got to gym today Maz was walking around grinning and showing everyone pictures of her niece. She had tons of hair, and a cute little hat. She was so adorable!!
On another note, as Laura said, in the last installment of Illini Ink, we had our Halloween Intra-squad, and I thought it went great. I was really impressed with how everyone is looking so far. A lot of the team (all of the freshman and juniors) got new floor routines, and it was really fun to see everyone's new routine in a competition like situation. Also, I was really excited to see our four new freshman, Sam, Lashlee, Al, and Mel, "compete" as Illini for their first time. You could tell they all were a little nervous, but they didn't show it in their routines. They did great, and I was really proud to see them do so well. I think they are all amazing additions to our Illini family. On the Sunday after the Intra-squad, we got to watch the whole thing on video. Being able to watch your routines is extremely helpful. You can really take the time to look closely at all of the little things that we need work on. Sometimes, it's really hard to know exactly what you're doing wrong until you are able to see it. After we watched the video, we had practice and we were able to start working on the little things we saw. These last few days have been really great practices; you can see that everyone's really trying hard to make corrections, and it's beginning to show.
I can't wait to see how much improvement we make from now until Mixed Pairs, which is our inter-squad we do with the guys gymnastics team. It's on December 7th. A couple of weeks ago, the freshman made a big poster board with all of our meets for the upcoming season, and all of our names in cute blue and orange stars. Also, in the center of the poster, there is a count down of the days until our mixed pair's competition. They did a really nice job on it, and it's a really good way to remind everyone about the amount of time we have until we need to be ready to be on the competition floor, and it keeps everyone on track and working hard. I can't wait to see what this season is going to bring!!
Well, that's all for now. Thank you for reading and GO ILLINI!!!
Kim Kruk
