Hello Illini friends and family!

The past couple weeks have passed by in such a blur that I can't believe we've already competed three meets this season and that the new semester has started.

After competing at Central Michigan on January 11th, we had one more week of winter break left for us to enjoy. In addition to the last week of winter break practice, we had several exciting things happen. In the middle of the week, Kelsi found out that GGP offered her an accounting position in Chicago! She of course accepted the position, and we are all so excited for her. To celebrate this exciting new opportunity, the team surprised Kelsi by decorating her apartment with several handmade congratulatory posters and baking her some treats.

During that week, we also took some time to get together and practice for Jock Jams, the annual student athlete fundraising event which will be held on Wednesday, February 4th. After breaking our proposed performance into sections, we taught ourselves a few of the sections and ran through the parts that we had a couple times. By the end, we all had the final section down and were looking pretty good!

All too soon, the end of the week came. We visited Kenwood Elementary School on Friday at lunch time where we sat and socialized with many of the young kids. As each of the grades came and went in the cafeteria, we spread out and sat at different tables and listened to all the children's interesting stories and watched them excitedly run outside to play while reminiscing about our own elementary school days. That evening, we had a game night with the men's team where we played several rounds of Catch Phrase, Cards Against Humanity, and Chess as a fun way to relax and enjoy each others' company before the next day's competition.

Saturday kicked-off our first home meet of the season against Rutgers. As always, competing at home is so much fun with all the friends and family and of course all the fans that come to watch. We had a great meet and hit our first team score of 196 this season! It felt great to hit such a solid score in just our second meet of the year.

On Sunday, the underclassmen moved back into the dorms bringing mixed emotions to the team. All the upperclassmen, while happy to finally have their apartments back were sad to see all the beloved extra roommates go, and the underclassmen were all happy to finally have their own spaces back where they didn't have to live out of a suitcase any longer. At the same time, reality truly began to sink in as everyone realized that the first day of school was barely two days away.

On Monday, we did one last winter break team activity together and served at Daily Bread and Soup Kitchen in Champaign. We helped prepare the food and did various jobs including making soup, making cheese and cracker plates, cutting up vegetables for salad, and making bologna sandwiches.

School classes and our first spinning class of the semester officially started on Tuesday the 20th. With the start of classes, our hectic schedules resumed and we spent syllabus week reorienting ourselves with how to balance practice, rehab, classes, sleep, and homework.

Finally, on Sunday we competed at the University of Michigan. We were excited to compete against one of the top ranked gymnastics teams so that we could both see and do great gymnastics. Even though we knew we could have had a stronger performance in some areas, we still had some awesome highlights. Erin and Giana both set new career high all-around scores with a 39.150 and 39.350 respectively. The beam team also stuck all their dismounts, a goal for which we've strived for since the start of season.

With another meet coming up quickly this weekend, we're anxious to get back in the gym to practice to perfect our routines. We know that our hard work always pays off and we'll be working hard this week to hopefully smoothen out some of the bumps we faced at this past meet.

So, that's all for now everyone! Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Illini Ink update. Our next meet is our annual PINK MEET as well, so mark your calendars for this Saturday, January 31st at 4pm in Huff Hall against Penn State. Hope to see you all there!

Tori