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 fourth entry focuses on the team scoring its second-highest score at an NCAA Championships in program history (197.250) to finish fifth in the country.
What a day. What a year. What a team.
Seriously though, this year has been quite the ride, but as so many of us like to say, we wouldn't want to do it with anyone else.
We've been reminiscing a lot about the start of this season, the infamous 193 in our first meet, and how amazing it is that we've come so far. And it truly is amazing.
The confidence and resilience that resulted from all of our hardships, setbacks and challenges this year is what allowed us to go into the Super Six as underdogs with the mindset of national champions.
From the beginning of the meet, there was an incredible amount of love and joy surrounding this team. When Sami got out there to perform her final floor routine, it literally brought people to tears. And I don't use the word "literally" incorrectly.
Ebee had everyone jumping up and down after nailing her double layout, and Tay stayed calm to finish out what was a bit of a nail biting floor rotation. While the meet at this point wasn't going entirely our way, we did not for one second get down on ourselves but just continued to enjoy our last moments as this team.
On vault, we improved our landings from yesterday and went all out with Ebee and Ivie highlighting the rotation with two beautiful vaults at the end.
On to bars. Wow. Again. Killed it.
Beautiful from top to bottom, and I'm about 99.9 percent sure everyone lost their voice from some crazy excited cheering. Seriously, you ought to watch videos of our bar rotation and it will make you cry of happiness. Especially along with Sami, who, in her last performance of her gymnastics career, competed about as beautifully as you possibly can and broke everyone's heart with her celebration.
Last rotation: beam. Not to be overdramatic, but SWG on beam is basically the most beauty and grace and power you'll see from anyone in the country. Becky closed out her career in a wonderfully exciting way with a fantastic beam routine along with Kristina in a clutch performance that was beautiful despite the pressure.
Ebee made her collegiate beam debut and did so a huge fashion with no wobbles and a great double pike dismount.
And then there was Ivie.
Between her second-to-none-except-maybe-Sami's toe point, her difficulty, her awe inspiring lines, and her completely unshakeable mindset and form, her score of a 9.975 accurately showed just why everyone on the team, everyone in the crowd, and even the judges were entirely captivated.
And just like that, it was all over. I'm not exaggerating a bit when I say that not one of us cared what place we ended up. No matter what the results said, we were content and proud and overjoyed and overwhelmed.
Hugs and tears and laughter flowed freely. It was a moment that will stay with us all for years to come, and the magic of it is something that I will be forever grateful to have experienced.
The warmest of thanks to all of our fans, our coaching staff, our friends and family, and to this team.
The collective belief of everyone who has supported this team is what enabled is to finish this journey the way we did.
So, again and again and again – thank you.