Stanford women's gymnastics is competing in its eighth NCAA Championships in the past nine years, and 15th overall, this weekend in Fort Worth, Texas. Cardinal sophomore Carinne Gale will be providing a student-athlete's perspective of the trip and competition in a weekend blog series. Her first entry focuses on the trip to Texas and NCAA Banquet.
At 8 a.m. this fine Wednesday morning SWG was all ready to go at the gym. There was the typical, tangible, anticipatory energy that comes with the fact that SWG IS GOING TO NATIONALS! But there was also a real tone of quiet determination and confidence.
In everyone's eyes, you could see them thinking, "Yes, this is all very exciting and fantastic, but it's also exactly what we set out to do this year, and we're ready for it."
We loaded onto the bus with Taylor Rice winning SWG Best Dressed (I'm assuming she would have won this if we had voted), rocking her studded boots, furry jacket and hair I'm going to call grayish-yellow.
The rest of SWG looked great too in our dresses for the banquet, puffy jackets (because Texas is so cold, obviously) and backpacks. No one got detained in security at the airport (yay!) and we made our way to Fort Worth, Texas, because, in case you didn't know, SWG IS GOING TO NATIONALS!
After some minor turbulence, which was really just fun enough to be like a roller coaster but with higher stakes, we touched down in the very green city of Dallas.
Ready as we were in our dresses, we headed to the NCAA Banquet where tons of incredible gymnasts were gathered. All were dressed up in cowboy boots and clothing that wasn't a leotard.
After lots of pictures and catching up with old friends from other schools, SWG got some Texas-style grub and sat down to a lovely dinner show complete with terrifying gun shots (blanks, I'm told) and cowboys who thought scaring us with these gun shots was the most entertaining thing they'd ever do.
We got to see some incredible college gymnasts receive awards for their college careers and then it was time to finally get to the hotel and have a bit of down time. We called it a night pretty early in order to wake up well-rested and pumped for a great practice day – one of our last with our fantastic seniors!
This team is an amazing one and that's something we've known all year and continued to prove to ourselves and others with each and every challenge we overcame. As a team, we know our story and we know all of the hard work and love that went into it.
And now SWG is ready to show Fort Worth, Texas, just how powerful and important and strong that story is.