This year’s Gymnastics season has come to an end, and all of its members are extremely proud of their efforts this season. The gymnastics team has a record of 4-5, with four wins, and five losses.
Senior Max Weng thought that overall, the season went “much better” than the team has expected. This year was a new experience for them, due to the fact that the team has never “faced most of the schools [they] did”. Weng shares that many of the schools they had to compete against “had access to club gyms, allowing their gymnasts to train in optimal conditions for much longer than [the MHS team] ever had”, but assures that the team had “beaten [other schools] at some meets and come close in the others”, despite the difference.
Weng adds that the team has improved at “an exponential rate”. In this season, Weng states that the majority of the team is comprised of people who “never had any gymnastics experience whatsoever”, and “[they are] working on and picking up skills” that Weng wishes he had “when [he joined Gymnastics] sophomore year”. According to Weng, at this rate, by 2021, “this year’s freshmen will have reached a level [he] could only have dreamed of”.
For Weng, the aspects that the team still has to improve on is “repetition and analyzing”. He states that “hitting a skill for the first time is exhilarating”, while mastering a skill is a process,
adding that the team “practices daily for a couple hours a day” to master skills. He believes that having a “fellow teammate record your progress” will help a gymnast “figure out” what they need to improve on.
Junior Jenna Vanella admits that even though the team “[would have] liked to have won more meets than [they] did”, she says that “overall, [she thinks their] season went very well.” She also believes that this year, the team has “improved immensely”, since members have “new routines and new skills”, and the team always “continues to strive for better”.
On improvement, Vanella feels that the team “could improve on being more efficient in practice”, saying that “[they] tend to get sidetracked more often than not”.
The best moment in a meet this season for Vanella is when she did a “backward roll on the beam and [she] was stuck on the side”. Vanella knew that if she had fallen off, “[she would] end up losing .5 of a point”, so she resorted to struggling “as hard as [she] could to stay on the beam and not touch the floor”. Vanella explains that this was her best moment, since “not only was [her team] cheering for [her], but the other teams and the crowd were cheering for [her] to get back on.”
The team has had their fair share of great moments this season, but they also had a few challenging moments. The very beginning of the season proved to be challenging for Weng. The first-years competed for the first time with routines “they barely knew” against Winthrop, and “their nervousness set the tone for each other”. Weng stresses that “getting over that nervousness and pushing each other out of [their] comfort zones” was essential this year, and that was a moment that “needed to happen.”
Like many of Malden High’s sports, there is a States competition in Gymnastics, but according to Weng and Vanella, senior Kaytlin Kwong was “the only person that could even qualify”, and she was “shy a few points from qualifying to compete.”
This experience, of being so close to qualifying for states, was “so frustrating” to Kwong, who ended up being less than a tenth of a point from qualifying. Kwong says that she “never got the chance to compete at [their] last meet”, due to an ankle injury that occurred during warm up. Despite this, she says that the season was “really satisfying” for her since she got to “compete one last time with so many of [her] friends”, and “did so much better this season than last season”.
This year, Vanella says that the team’s bond “has grown a lot.” She explains that “[they have become] closer and closer with every practice and meet that goes by, and [they have] helped each other to grow as people and gymnasts.” Vanella adds that “[she loves] every member of [her] team, new and old, and [she would not] want to share [their] wins with anyone else other than [her] talented teammates”.
Kwong says she will definitely “miss the family [they] created on the team” since this is her last year. She recalls that she has made so many friendships from being on the team and that she is “going to miss [them] so much”. Kwong also says that she will “miss the coaches”, adding that they “pushed [her] to try new things and [they] were always there for [her] whether it was related to gymnastics or not”
Weng declares that if anybody is interested in joining gymnastics, “join as soon as possible”, admitting that he “regrets not joining [his] freshman year”.
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