Preparing for her first gymnastics meet of the season, junior Rachel Stein said there are many things to look forward to for the upcoming meet.

“I’m really excited to get back out there and feel the adrenaline of everybody watching you do your floor routine,” Stein said. “By the time our first meet comes around, we’ll have our apparel and our new leotards. It’s fun to see things that I and the other captains created come to life.”

According to sophomore Ryan Rasmussen, the team has been training hard to make the most out of the next meet. 

“We’re conditioning every day for 30 minutes, we’re learning new skills, trying to upgrade our routines and putting them all together to score as high as we can,” Rasmussen said.

Coach Dawn Thielen said the team has created a welcoming community for the new members that will benefit the team this season.

“We have a lot of new talent coming in and the strength as a team (is from) the veteran girls doing a really good job of helping pull the new girls through,” Thielen said. “Everyone’s working really hard and they’re in really good shape for the most part so we’ve got a lot of new skills we’re working on.”

According to Stein, with a limited amount of healthy returning gymnasts, many new girls will have the opportunity to compete.

“It’s going to be really fun to see everybody competing, especially some of the new girls (who) will be competing at our first meet since we have a good amount of injuries,” Stein said. “It’ll be a really good way to get everybody introduced to competition.”

Thielen said this meet will be a way to figure out what skill-level the girls are at and where they can improve.“(The goal is to) get them as prepared as possible and then we’ll get a score and an idea of where we’re at (so we can) change it from there,” Thielen said. “Getting our stamina up so we can make it through our meets and cleaning up our routines and getting ready in general (will be important).”