Hello everyone,

As I mentioned in previous posts, I had AAU Trampoline Nationals at the Junior Olympics two weeks ago. As per usual with my meets, I had grand designs of filming all of my competition, compiling it into a video, uploading it to YouTube, and cross posting on my website and Tumblr. Unfortunately, I hardly got any usable footage of the prelims, double mini finals, or synchro, and have decided that making a video would be kind of pointless. I am instead going to write a post about it.

First, I had preliminaries for double mini and trampoline. I competed against 5 girls on double mini and 3 on trampoline. Usually, I excel at DMT and struggle with trampoline, but I suppose it was opposite day, as I finished 2nd on trampoline with a score of 18.0 and in 4th place (really 5th as there was a tie ahead of me) on DMT with a score of 38.5. Unfortunately, I had had a significant form error in my first pass (on a straddle jump of all things) and scored a measly 18.8.

The next day (well, two days later) I had trampoline finals. In the prelims I was 0.7 behind the girl in first; we had the same execution score, but since AAU includes difficulty at my level she edged me out by having an additional barani in her pass. I did even better in finals than I did in prelims, and actually got a higher execution score than the girl who had beat me in prelims, but unfortunately her difficulty still put me 0.8 behind her. I got second place overall with a score of 36.3, which I am certainly very proud of.

The day after that was double mini finals and synchronized trampoline. I changed my first pass from the spotter straddle dismount pike barani pass I had thrown in prelims to a spotter tuck dismount tuck barani and had much better pass, scoring 0.8 higher than I did in prelims. My second pass was the same and I also got a very good score on it, rounding out the total to 78.0. Unfortunately, because of my error in prelims I had no real chance of moving up in the rankings and ended up 5th. It was a bummer, to say the least, especially since I was state champion on DMT and generally consider DMT to be my better event.

Then I had synchro. This was entirely for fun, especially since my partner (who is seven years younger than me) and I were the only ones in our age group. We had only practiced our routine about 5 times in the gym before we got to warm up before competition. Unfortunately, my partner was much less confident in the air than me and ended up not jumping high enough to stay in sync with me; I tried to catch up, but after the third skill in our pass she was a full skill ahead of me. We ended up scoring 12.9. Now, since this was my first time competing synchro, I have no idea how the scoring works, but this score struck me as seriously low; I know our sync score was terrible, but I would have thought the execution scores would have been fairly okay. But what do I know?

Despite my disappointment with double mini, I had a great time at JOs. I especially enjoyed being able to watch my team mates compete. It was a much smaller competition that USTA nationals, and things went by a whole lot quicker (although there was a parade the day I had tramp finals that set everything back an hour… but never mind that). I kind of feel like I ended my amateur trampoline career on a bit of an anticlimax, but I am excited to see where I go with diving (and possibly continue with trampoline at school by starting a club).

~Nicki