Academy Meet After Action Report

I didn't get to really do much filming (too busy working). But I'll spend these next two days posting up some of the things that I did capture. Sunday morning started out with a last minute private. Alyssa has only been in my Saturday intermediate class for a few weeks, and only decided to do the Academy Meet midway through her class the day before the Academy Meet (and was also late to class). She pretty much learned the floor routine this weekend. Running late to her private, she explained her mom had to run to Starbucks. That she always has to stop there, no matter what. I didn't realize before what a funny kid she is. She bombarded me with conversation that seemed random and irrelevant to the task at hand. On vault, after landing her handstand to her back, she tells me, "My arm pits smell." Over at bars, we had a conversation that went something like,

Alyssa: "Can I go tell my crazy mom something?"

Me: "Yes."

Alyssa: "You think my mom is crazy?!?"

Don't you love how she set me up?

Participants were supposed to arrive at 12pm. When Alyssa showed up sometime after 1pm when we were about to march out, I asked her, "Why were you late". She nodded her head matter-of-factly, "Starbucks."

She and Sydney can be somewhat of a pair of misfits when they are together in class. They just bonded from day one; had each other at, "Hello." So it's appropriate that they did their floor routine together:



Here is Janie, doing her floor routine:



I don't teach her, but knew her and her older sister Gracie from when they came to SMGC over summer camp.

Alejandra's come a long way, since the last Academy Meet. Grace and Sophie shown here are "graduates" of my advanced group. It is amazing, to see Grace doing this because she is not the kind of person that gets up in front of a crowd. Learning routines did not come easy to her, either. She was invited to team earlier in the year, but wasn't ready then. Same happened with Emma Shapland who is also now on team.



More to be added later....

Sydney Preps for the Academy Meet

Sydney's an SMGC kid who just started back up this session at LASG. She was very focused today during her private in preparation for the Academy Meet.


After being behind in the music all day, her last two times, she rushed and ended up finishing ahead of it.

This is level 2 music; but not the actual level 2 routine.

New Soul Birthday

Kaliray is one of our SMGC kids who migrated over to LASG. Last Sunday was her birthday party, and I was happy to have been asked to work it. Robyn and Heather are also former SMGC coaches who worked the party, along with coach Desiree.

The zipline (which you can see in Malaika and Anna's video) broke on Saturday, so we worked without one of the main attraction party gimmicks at LASG. This was only my 2nd part at LASG, so I'm a bit out of my groove on running parties and learning the LASG format and material.

Kaliray is another kid who I've always loved, but who I don't see enough of. She misses a lot of gymnastics classes (at LASG, she's signed up for my Monday intermediate class along with Malaika and Anna- all originally part of Al and Teri's junior advanced Wednesday). Cute as all heck. Some of that should come through in this raw footage:



I hope to someday use the footage in a future video. One-legged inch worms are what we call one of SMGC's standard warm up passes across the floor where you hold one leg high in the air, then move both arms forward, followed by moving the bottom leg forward. I remember teaching a class of physically fit stuntmen/martial artists and it just about killed them. Most of the kids don't have much love for the exercise either, in spite of the cute name given to the drill.



Anna and Malaika were at Anna's violin recital, so weren't at the party.

I wish I had better footage of my handstand push-ups at the beginning of the video; I did two no problem, with Kaliray on my back without touching the mat (not confident and consistent yet to do it away from the wall) the first go round; but was too muscle-tired to do it in 2 takes for the camera. I'm way past my prime, but think I want to work on this; hopefully before the 40-50 lb kids I work with turn into 60 lbers!

Anna and Malaika on Top of the World

So today, Anna and Malaika did an hour shared private backhandspring workshop clinic.

Malaika's done backhandsprings a couple of times by herself with the soft sting mat draped over the pit, a couple of weeks ago. Anna's been close to me not spotting her...it has just been a matter of consistency that keeps my hand there.

They both ended up doing their backhandsprings on different surfaces, by themselves, today. Of course we'll go back to drilling and shaping, but for now, they had a blast being able to experience the thrill of doing a "big skill" by themselves. If I remember that far back, it's an exhilerating, liberating feeling.....the freedom of flight.



I was actually looking for the Shonen Knife cover of the song for this video, but settled on the accidental discovery of my copy of the Carpenters. I grew up loving Karen Carpenter's voice.