Tumble Talk: Margaux Meeks
11/5/2007 7:00:00 AM | Gymnastics
Nov. 5, 2007
Previous Terps Tumble Talks
Well here we are in the first week of November, the weather is cooling down and the leaves have begun falling from the trees. Our campus here is truly one of the most beautiful places during this time of year. Being about a month away from our first intra-squad, we are all as motivated as ever in the gym. We were put to our first test as a team this past week in our first annual "show and tell" event. Monday we warmed up and competed bars and floor, and Tuesday was vault and beam. It was so exciting to be able to show the coaches and the girls what we have been working so hard on!
So Monday afternoon, we walked into the gym with confidence and began warming up. Still recovering from ACL surgery, I jumped back into my familiar position of first up on bars and hit a very solid routine with everything but the dismount. It felt great to be up there swinging around again with everyone watching. After I went, one by one each girl stepped up to the plate and knocked out excellent routines. All of the freshmen have huge release moves. Abbey performs both an excellent looking Shaposhnikova and a huge Tkatchev. Kaitlin, Candice, Allie and now Brandi all have really solid Tkatchevs' also. Lisa, Alyssa and Gretchen have huge Geingers. Kelsey McDermid and Michele have a very solid routine that are looking more amazing each and every day! I have a very good feeling about bars this year :! Also on Monday everyone showed their floor routine complete with their rockin' choreography and solid passes. It was so much fun to watch the girls show off their floor routines. Michele even managed to throw us a wink in the middle of her choreography!
Tuesday we started off on vault with some very nice vaults. Gretch trained extremely hard this summer and it shows as she now has a Yerchenko full vault. Our freshmen also looked great on vault as well and we are definitely heading in the right direction. It was really hard for me to watch the girls compete vault without being up there with them. My rehabilitation is going very well and I have it in my head that I am going to be running down that vault runway full-speed very soon! Also on Tuesday we were able to show off our beam routines and we had some very solid routines by Brandi and Gretchen, which were truly standout routines. During beam warm-up Vicki came to me and asked if I wanted to show a watered down beam routine. At first I was a little apprehensive because I felt like I wasn't quite ready for it, but then I decided to go for it. Well I ended up hitting my skills and feeling really good about myself afterwards! All of the girls and coaches have been very supportive of me and I really appreciate all the encouragement that I get from them. I am so excited to be apart of such a positive team!
Speaking of positive, Duke made copies of a great movie/documentary called 'The Secret' and gave us each one to watch. I found it to be very inspirational and wrote down several very good quotes from the movie to put on our 'quote of the day' board in the gym. I recommend this movie to everyone as it is very inspiring.
With Halloween being on Wednesday I decided to hold a little get together at my apartment. All the girls came over and we played the board game called Loaded Questions and watched the movie 'The Invisible'. Every time we have team get togethers like these I find myself laughing hysterically the entire time! We always have so much fun together!
Well I hope you enjoyed reading this week's tumble talk!
*Mo*
