I cannot believe that I forgot to post about the Level 5 State meet. It was the week after Halloween Jamboree and so much has happened since then in our lives, that I guess it slipped my mind.
The State meet was held at the same gym as the Halloween Jamboree. It was a little different in that they were using both sets of equipment and little Z was on the set that she did not use the week before. The nice thing about this meet is that one of her old teammates is now at the gym where the meet was held. She ended up walking in Z's group and being able to talk to Z between events. It was nice to see them together and for them to be able to catch up. The other great thing about this is that Z's dad was able to come watch--it is the first State meet that he has been to.
Beam was first. I'm always nervous with beam, but she did well. She wound up with a 9.000.
Floor was second. This has typically been Z's best event and she did not disappoint. She scored a 9.375, one of her personal bests. But there were some high scores and even with a 9.375, she wound up in 4th place.
Vault was up next. She typically does pretty well on vault, but during warm up things just looked off. She wasn't getting much push off the vault table and on one practice vault she actually hit her back on the edge of the table. I was really worried about how she was going to do. But once again, she pulled it out and scored a 9.225. Not as high as she has done in the past, but much better than I expected based upon her warm up. This was enough for 6th place.
Her last event was bars. Although her year started out poorly on bars due to her dismount, she has really pulled it out after changing to a lay-out fly away. She got up and did great--her casts were high (one so high she said that she almost scared herself) and scored a 9.300. This was enough for 2nd place. Her coach thought the score was a little low, but we were happy.
For All-Around she scored a 36.900--her second highest all-around score and 5th place. It was weird to see that only one-tenth of a point separated 2nd from 5th place. She was sooo close to second place. And, once again, had she been competing with her older teammate, she would have placed 1st all-around since she scored higher than her teammate.
Overall, we were really happy with her results. She scored at least a 9.000 on every event--a first for her.
Now we are on to Optionals. Her first meet will be January 20-22, however, we are going to have an intersquad meet on January 13th. She has all of her routines finished and it is just time to polish them and ensure that she has the skills that she needs for each event. :)
