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Good advice from Sports Girls Play:

It doesn’t matter what sport your child chooses, at some point she will come to you and say that she wants to quit. It’s perfectly normal!

Everyone has a bad day, everyone has a rough patch, and as a coach or a parent, it is your job to help your athlete get to the root of the problem, create a coping strategy, and get through the down time. …

… make a deal … stick with practice until the end of the month, after all, they have already paid for it. After each practice, the athlete needs to tell Mom one positive thing about the practice. At the end of the month, they will discuss whether it is time to try a new sport or to keep going.

I have a feeling that by the end of the month, all will be just fine. I have seen this situation play itself out hundreds of times over.

Keeping Athletes in the Sport

That post has more good tips on how to keep athletes in the sport.

My experience when an athlete summons up the courage to tell me they are thinking of quitting: stay calm, be very understanding and sympathetic.

The worst thing to do at that moment is to try to talk them out of it. Or to get emotional.

Simply set a last-training-day, quietly and confidentially, at least 2-weeks in the future.

In well over 90% of cases the athlete decides to stay on. Especially if the parents are supportive.

Often the kids are simply trying to communicate something difficult to verbalize. It’s easier to say “I want to quit” than to explain the more complicated issue to parents and coach.

I’ve not raved often enough about this Courtney.

What the Olympic medalist has done in her career (so far) is truly amazing.

After suffering a torn Achilles in 2003, she came back quickly to win Nationals 2004 and qualify for the Olympics. She’s now twice defending NCAA All-around Champion.

Can Courtney win a 3rd title in 2008 at home in Georgia?

Click PLAY or watch Courtney’s rehab video on YouTube.

Courtney’s sister and team-mate Ashley tore her Achilles tendon just days before NCAA Championships 2007. I hope it will heal just as well.

Look for a more recent Courtney interview on Shannon Miller’s cn8.tv show.

Courtney Kupets – Wikipedia

Is this for real?

From the Gym Chat forum:

New leotards rule in code of points:
http://www.fig-gymnastics.com/LOB/media/MEDIA14990.pdf

From International Gymnastics Federation: May 31, 2007

Allowed:

leotards with long sleeves (must be skin tight)

long tights (must be skin tight)

full-length one piece leotard (unitard) (must be skin tight)

For reasons of safety:

can’t cover face or head

any other “dress” which is not skin tight is not allowed with the exception of the skirt in Rhythmic Gymnastics as defined in the RG Code of Points

Since it’s not listed that skin tight shorts aren’t allowed in that last section, I guess … UPDATE: Nope. Seems tight shorts are still not allowed in official FIG competitions of any kind. They will one day, I predict.

The reason for the change in code of point:

“To allow more accessibility to competition, all women’s disciplines harmonize their uniform rules to allow the following”

Awesome! With this, should come also changes in those clubs that require you practice in just leotards.

Gymnastics Message Boards – Gym Chat :: View topic – New leotards rule!

I assume the rationale is to encourage women from other cultures (e.g. Islam) to participate in FIG competition.

Whatever the reason, I like the idea.

This all needs clarification. It is not at all clear that girls and women are allowed to wear tight shorts in competition. But I hope it happens.

It reminds me of the time I fought for Canadian College club team girls to have the option to wear lycra “bike shorts” over a leotard in competition. (OK, it wasn’t a fight. Everyone agreed instantly it was a good idea.)

Then, when it came to competition, … all the girls I coached decided together not to wear shorts, after all.

What do you think coaches? Want to allow girls to have more options in what they wear in competition? Leave a comment.

berryblue likes the idea – Gym Chat

Women’s Artistic judges and judge educators may be interested in some new software out of Belgium.

WAG Symbols version 1.2 is the basis for all computer users that want to work with gymnastics symbols.

During installation a font is installed on your computer that contains all elements from the current Code of Points (2007). The application enables you to copy those elements into other applications like Word, Excel, etcetera.

I’ve had personal experience using pictograph fonts developed by Dave Burgess from Saskatoon. They are fast, scalable, available to any document with access to the font set.

You could put them into a Word document, for example, then save as PDF for distribution. I can’t think of an easier way to script routines other than with a pencil.

Coaches Tom Van Hauwaert and Lieve Van den Brandt are the developers. They are looking for beta testers to download for 20-days to see what should be improved.

As with all software, you’d need to stay on top of updates to the software and operating system requirements. A hassle, normally.

We’d love to see a web-based version, as well. Somewhere I could quickly script and print routines for a small fee.

Gymnastics Software – Products

This is my buddy Ed Louie. He’s the Canadian Women’s Gymnastics National Team massage therapist, a coach and much, much more. Ed’s one of most insightful people I know in the sport — analysing gymnastics training as good or bad, smart or dumb, relative to the patterns of injury he treats.

At Nationals 2007, Ed was the most sought after man on the floor by coaches of athletes who have had past success in treatment. Ed’s reputation with some is almost Biblical.

To clarify what he is doing, Ed shows software to gymnasts and coaches.

This is faster, easier and makes medical gobbledegook jargon real to ever pragmatic coaches who just want to know, “How fast can you fix her?”

I can’t give out Ed’s contact information. (He is far, far too busy.)

But check out his preferred software: Primal Pictures – 3D Interactive human anatomy software for medical and health professionals and educators

Deciding athlete line-up in a team competition is a very, very difficult task.

If the USA had won Worlds, we’d never hear about this issue. We’d have assumed the coaches made a good call.

Here’s a quick summary of a summary from The Perfect 10 blog. (Read the original article if you want to weigh in on this one.)

If you haven’t read the Ziert Alert from April’s International Gymnast, you should. Paul Ziert, publisher of International Gymnast magazine, as per usual, does not hesitate to call it like he sees it. …

Ziert researched the United States’ Women’s lineup from the 2006 World Championships Team Finals, which, to use his word, was a fiasco.

… Ashley Priess and Natasha Kelley were completely left out of the finals line up.

… the U.S. dominated the prelims by a whopping 3.80! They were virtually unbeatable. So it was a shock to see them slip to second behind China in the finals. It was especially curious to see Priess and Kelley not listed in the line up when you consider the fact that Nastia Liukin (one of the four U.S. athletes that was listed) was injured and only able to compete on Bars. If one of the remaining 3 athletes listed had had to scratch from an event, as Chellsie Memmel almost did and probably should have, the U.S. Team would have would up in 8th place.

perfect 10 » Punishing Athletes: Is USAG using Psychological Ploys?

Wild conjecture? I’m not so sure this time.

Ziert is not the most responsible source. My observation of IG over the years is that Ziert often gets it wrong, Normile (editor) always gets it right.

In any case, 2006 was the unimportant Worlds. There will be a lot more scrutiny of at Worlds 2007 in Stuttgart as it qualifies for the Olympics.

U.S. women earn team silver medal – USA Gymnastics 2006

photo gallery – USA Gymnastics 2006

Seems a LOT of difficulty for one not yet in Grade school.

I recall Kyle Shewfelt at age-6, another “wonderkind” like Ashley. His coach was much more patient.

Click PLAY or watch Ashley on YouTube.

There are many more videos like this on the multimedia page of her official website.

Rhythmic Gymnastics photos are already very striking.

Here are samples from a gallery where a Thai photographer experimented with Photoshop editing.

Gymnastics 2004 Photo Gallery by chak-k at pbase.com

Guillermo Alvarez edged first-day leader Jonathan Horton by .05 to win the U.S. Men’s Qualifier, which finished Saturday at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

Alvarez, .2 behind Horton on Thursday, outscored Horton 88.250-88.00 to take the title. Both Alvarez (13.200) and Horton (13.450) took their lowest score on high bar.

David Durante finished third all-around ahead of Sho Nakamori.

Alvarez won pommel horse and tied Horton for the title on floor exercise. Other titlists were Kevin Tan (still rings), Sean Golden (vault), Justin Spring (parallel bars) and Joseph Hagerty (high bar).

Reigning national champion Sasha Artemev, who finished seventh on Thursday, scratched from today’s competition.

The competition served as a qualifier to the U.S. National Championships, scheduled for Aug. 15-18 in San Jose, Calif.

All-Around
1. Guillermo Alvarez 178.100
2. Jonathan Horton 178.050
3. David Durante 174.900
4. Sho Nakamori 174.300
5. Todd Thornton 172.600
5. Sean Townsend 172.600
7. Bryant Hadden 171.650
8. Tim Gentry 170.850

International GYMNAST Magazine Online

Even with Artemev, the scores drop off a cliff. The US Team may need the Hamms or one of the other veterans.

Guillermo Alvarez – USA Gymnastics bio

IG photo Jeff Spivey

Jonathan Horton hotdogging on High Bar at Winter Cup 2007: Kovacs, direct Kolman, and 1/1-in triple back dismount.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

(I won’t post the second attempt where Horton crashed.)

Incidentally, the full twisting double back to regrasp should be called the “Pineda”. I filmed Tony Pineda catch it at the 1985 World Championships in Montreal.

Because he was from Mexico, in an early morning flight, it seem to get ignored.

What year and where did Kolman first compete it?