Nile Wilson provides a glimpse of National Team training at Lilleshall. And talks about his own struggles in trying to comeback in time for Worlds trials.
• CA coaching FX landings
• Rings tip from Courtney Tulloch
• Shrinkage
At the 2017 Worlds — with no team competition — the Americans are more beatable than they have been in some time.
What about 2018 and the rest of the quadrennial?
There are many, many super talented Juniors vying for Senior team spots this quad. GAGE gymnasts were getting rave reviews at Championships, but it’s difficult to say now which will end up on future Worlds teams.
Dvora Meyers:
There’s a long history of female juniors outperforming their senior counterparts. …
This year’s junior champion was Maile O’Keefe, a 15-year-old from Las Vegas. … But 14-year-old Emma Malabuyo from Texas has been nipping at her heels. Both O’Keefe and Malabuyo have been putting up high all-around scores all season, often topping what the best seniors in the world were recording. At the national championships, both recorded 57+ scores in the all-around, which would’ve beaten everyone in the senior field save Smith. …
After a season spent watching them excel, you can’t help but to start playing a game of “if only” in your head.
If only Gabby Perea was one day older, she’d on the world championships team as an uneven bars specialists.
If only Maile O’Keefe was one year older, she could become world all-around champion. …
The Russian Gymnastics Federation, which has been working on trying to boost its meet attendance and take advantage of social media to attract fans, tweaked the team format in Yekaterinburg. This year’s format dropped the team size from six gymnasts to four, with three scores counting. …
… “If you back the last few quadrenniums, half the team has always had guys from the NCAA programs, almost always at least half,” Williams pointed out to me before the start of the competition. “Sometimes half of them have been from Oklahoma,” he said with a laugh.
Collegiate gymnastics has managed to pull off this feat despite few scholarships and just fifteen remaining Division I programs. “There’s maybe in the neighborhood of 25-30 guys that are getting scholarships across the country and that’s it,” Williams pointed out. That means there are more athletes getting scholarships on a single Division I football team than there are for all of the collegiate male gymnasts in the United States. …