Category: Uncategorized

The excellent hit reality TV show is coming to The Great White North.

CTV to Develop Canadian Edition of So You Think You Can Dance

… The Canadian version of the series is based on So You Think You Can Dance, the Emmy Award-winning, hit program … Canada now joins the United States, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Turkey and Israel as markets with an original So You Think You Can Dance production. Original versions of the series are also currently being produced in Australia, Poland and Malaysia and soon in Scandinavia as well. So You Think You Can Dance is a Top 3 summer series in Canada on CTV with an average audience of 1.25 million viewers.

…

So You Think You Can Dance Canada will embark on a nation-wide search for Canada’s favourite dancer. The new series will follow a similar format to its hit cousin, Canadian Idol: talented dancers of all shapes and sizes will compete to impress an expert panel of judges with their moves during a cross-country audition process. The dancers who spark the judges’ interest will be invited to call-backs where they will work with some of Canada’s top choreographers. The judges’ will then choose the Top 20 dancers who will continue in the competition. Then, it’s up to Canada to decide who stays and who goes as the public will vote for their favourites following weekly performance episodes in which the dancers are assigned different partners and dance styles to perform in competition, including hip-hop, krumping and popping to salsa, quickstep and jive. …

CHANNEL CANADA :: CTV to Develop Canadian Edition of So You Think You Can Dance

We’re looking for a Canadian Schwimmer now.

Click PLAY or watch Benji on YouTube.

Over the past weekend at R2R (Region 2 Rising) in Spokane many of the clinicians I talked with are worried that USA Gymnastics will not organize Congress events as well as they have been run independently in the past.

It seems a vote was just taken in this Region, the Pacific NW, to turn over their event to USAG Head Office in Indianapolis. Region 2 had been the last of the independent Congress events.

If top-down management was a good model, there would still be a Soviet Union.

Decentralization and competition are what made the United States great. This is a big step backward for Region 2 in my opinion.

I like the Australian model. Gymnastics Australia helps the regional congress events by providing an international clinician headliner. After that, each State in Australia does their own thing. They must make or break financially on their own.

Almost certainly, it will become obvious after a few years that quality has suffered. They will all be as vanilla as USA Congress.

Eventually the Congress events will be spun off back to the Regions.

At the same time, independent education events like Jeff Metzger’s Boot Camp will thrive.

No doubt good people at USA Gymnastics believe they can improve Congress events. Let’s see them prove me wrong.

Strict rules about nutrition for young athletes are a big mistake, in my experience.

They put the child athlete in a serious conflict: the coach’s rules vs peer pressure / temptation.

All the best coaches I know now talk to kids about making “good choices”. Education will work, long term, for those kids who are serious about their sport.

The real problem are the parents of athletes. Far fewer than half where I live provide reasonably healthy food for their children. (I don’t blame them. They have plenty of challenges of their own.)

The best parent education I’ve ever seen are grocery store tours like the ones organized by Gymnastics British Colombia:

Registered Dietician, Christina Baxter, will take you on a tour of a typical grocery store and give you practical and useful information …

Even better is when the child comes along on the tour with Mom or Dad.

The Dieticians of Canada offer The Virtual Grocery Store, an on-line interactive game. (It’s not all that fun. The real store tour is better.)

To be honest, good nutrition is not one of the most important variables of training. I’ve known a few very successful athletes who can eat anything with no effect on performance.

UPDATE: Dana Brass noted that her club Marian Gymnastics in Canada organized grocery store tours in the 1990s. We copied that idea at Taiso Gymnastics, I recall.

UPDATE: Check Anna’s comment below too. She feels kids today are “over-fed, … bombarded with food choices”. Too trure

Who are the “Super 7” again?

Oh …

The Super Seven U.S. Women’s Team made history by winning the first World Championships team gold medal outside the USA! The 2007 World Championships took place in Stuttgart, Germany, Sept. 1-9, and the Super Seven included Ivana Hong, Shawn Johnson, Nastia Liukin, Samantha Peszek, Alicia Sacramone, Bridget Sloan, and Shayla Worley.

USA Gymnastics is taking the Super Seven team on a fun trip to New York to celebrate the gold medal win. All seven team members will be on the Today Show on Friday, Oct. 26. They also get to do a little shopping and go to the theatre while in New York. The team also will visit Madison Square Garden, site of the 2008 Tyson American Cup, to help promote the event.

Super 7 interviews

(via Rutterja on Chalk Bucket)

Gym Chat posted gymnastics crossword puzzles and a word search.

Gymnastics Crossword & Word Search Puzzles – Play directly on Gym Chat or print them out!

I never thought much about windsurfing after trying and failing to turn one into the wind … a few times.

Then in New Zealand I saw crazy athletes getting HUGE air.

In this video watch attempts at double somersaults:

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

You can get the 40min video Committed (full DVD quality) free as a torrentfile from Peter Film ProductionS.

(via Get Outdoors – Committed Windsurf Trailer)

Presentation at USA Gymnastics Region 2 Congress 2007 (R2R), Spokane by GymnasticsCoaching.com editor Rick McCharles.

What is fun?

How can we have more fun in the gym? Especially for female Artistic Gymnasts?

This fast-paced video clip is an overview of the “science of fun”.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

related post – Christmas training camp – Mountain Shadows FUN “competition” video

JBS, administrator of the Chalk Bucket forum, notes that USA Gymnastics posted a new, simplified biographies page for their National Teams.

It’s an unusual format, but works well.

screenshot example

Check it out: Team Biographies – USA Gymnastics

At R2R I was happy to be introduced to Rafe Kelley, a gymnastics coach from Washington State.

He’s also a traceur, martial artist and acrobat.

Rafe travelled to France to train and study Parkour and Free Running. And is involved in the fast growing pursuit in his region.

Most interesting to me was a concept called Le Methode Naturelle:

A discipline that in many ways seems to unite all of my interests within the realm of physical development and my training has become much more productive and complete. This blog is to share a bit of my training and my thoughts for those interested in the natural capacities of human movement.

Read more on Rafe’s blog. From a recent post:

Playful, Methodical, and Fundamental. I believe these three principles are the basis of an effective long term training practice whether it is for Methode Naturelle, Parkour, Martial arts, or really most any discipline of human movement.

…
Natural Athletics: Three principles of good Practice

Click PLAY to see Rafe and friends practising what they love.

http://www.brightcove.tv/playerswf

Click on the logo to see all posts referencing the Coaches Congress 2007 in the Pacific NW.

It will be linked from the right hand navigation for the next few weeks.

Coaches often have eight different sessions to choose from. Tom Beach is here videotaping some sessions for GymSmarts.