Park’s girls gymnastics placed third out of four teams during their meet at Hopkins Highschool Dec. 5. It was their second meet of the season and despite their loss, head coach Dawn Thielen said the team had already augmented their overall score a lot from their first match, and still have many ways in which they can become better.
“There’s always room for improvement,” Thielen said. “That’s the beauty of gymnastics is you’re striving for perfection and as humans, perfection is hard. But we just improved by two and a half points over what we did Saturday.”
Junior Hazel Theis said she was really proud of herself for getting her squat on, on bars, which she has been in the process of achieving during practice for a while.
“I got my squat on, I’ve been practicing it, and I get it 40 percent of the time,” Theis said. “So I’m just really proud of that because everybody on my team knows that I’ve been working on that for so long.”
Freshman Tesa Allie said she experienced an overall good feeling about her performance. She said she is proud of herself due to the fact that she was able to complete some skills on beam for the first time.
“I think I did pretty good. I had some highs and some things that I could have done better but overall I think it was pretty good,” Allie said. “I was really proud of my beam today because it was the first time I did all my skills without falling.”
Theis said she appreciates her team for the reason that the team is really supportive, and that makes the season fun.
“We’re a really fun team and it’s also just a really welcoming team,” Theis said. “We’re all really forgiving and just very congratulatory, so if you do something even if you don’t do it well, we’re like you did really good on this skill. So it’s just the team is really, really great.”
Allie said she has been having a great season because everyone on team stays very connected and everyone gets along.
“Our team, we’re really close this year and we have like, a good bond so I think it’s really fun and we all get along.”
Thielen said she came back to coaching because she loves the team atmosphere. Gymnastics is full of welcoming and encouraging girls and to her that is what makes the sport so amazing.
“Park has always had a lot of really welcoming girls. They show great sportsmanship and they have very good attitudes,” Thielen said. “I had stepped away from coaching to judge and came back to it because that was something I missed.”
Park’s next gymnastics meet is at 6 p.m., Dec. 12, at central community center.
