What's a Little Competition Amongst Friends?

Anna and Malaika are good friends...and as often as they might root for each other, they just as often are competing fiercely against each other, whether it be for the affections of Malaika's little sister, performance in gymnastics, or national politics (Kimberly described them as having some pretty funny conversations talking about the election and the candidates).

Thursday's advanced class has turned into a mix of senior students, and young newbies who aren't quite up to speed. Robyn handed off the noobs to me the last half of class, and I spent time working on their backhandsprings, mostly from a conditioning standpoint, just to get them to do the numbers.

Anna and Malaika can both do their standing backhandsprings on their own, although it might make some coaches feel like they are witnessing fingernails on a chalkboard. Not a pretty sight. My hope was that the physical conditioning benefits would outweigh any reinforcement of bad technique through doing the repititions. I basically focused my attention on the 3 who didn't have their backhandsprings yet, and just gave Anna and Malaika numbers to do, on their own. When they finished the 20 I assigned them, I wasn't done with helping their classmates yet. So I told them to do 30 more. At first they didn't like that. But once they got into it, and Anna got to 50, Anna wanted to do 30 more. Of course, Malaika wasn't going to let her get away with doing more than her, so Malaika also pursued 30. At 80, Anna decided 80 wasn't that far off from the magic number of 100. I told her she gets bragging rights if she gets to a hundred and would have something to tell her parents about. She was all for that. The girls were alternating off, doing 10 each. But all of a sudden, Malaika wanted to get to a hundred before Anna did. Anna didn't like that at all that Malaika was taking more than 10 turns (at this point they were in the 90's). By the time class was over, I sent Anna to go join the other girls when she finished her 100. It took some effort to get Malaika to leave when she got to 100. She was really afraid that Anna did 110 and I had to do a lot of convincing that Anna only did 100; of course, Malaika still wanted to do 110 so as to top Anna. I forgot what I said now to convince her to go home, but it wasn't easy to get her to stop. Normally, it can be like pulling teeth to get them to "hang in there" and keep working toward the end of class. After 2 hours, these two often get cranky. So I was happy they maintained energy and enthusiasm to the "bitter" end.

The following is a quick video I pieced together. A couple of faces are missing from the vid, for which I apologize. But for the most part, most of the advanced girls are represented (we're working to change the name of the class to distinguish it more as a pre-team group and not the regular LASG advanced classes). I think this is the song Robyn was telling me about. So this is another video for her: