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February 23, 2004 Hello Husky Fans: It was quite a weekend for your Husky gymnastics team. We arrived in Tucson early Thursday evening, and went to TGI Friday's for dinner. Checked into our hotel, and were in for the evening. Friday morning arrived and Frank, Sean McDonald (Kelly's Dad), and I went golfing at La Paloma Country Club. Very ritzy!! It was undoubtedly the most beautiful golf course I have ever played. Back to the hotel and hang out. Heidi had taken the women shopping. Wow, what a slice of Americana, the women go shopping, and the men go golfing. We met in my room at 4:45 for a team meeting and then off to the McKale Center. When we arrived they were just putting down the floor, so open warm-ups were a little late starting. Warm-ups were pretty much normal, except that Kelly McDonald's heel was feeling very sore so I decided to pull her from floor & beam. We began on bars where we hit all six routines with Emily Pritchard, and Kelly McDonald both scoring 9.900, and Carly Dockendorf scoring an event high 9.925. Our team score on bars was 49.375 to Arizona's 49.425 on vault. We then went to vault and again went six-for-six with Tacia LaBatte, and Emily Pritchard scoring 9.900 & 9.950 respectively. We scored 49.125 to Arizona's 49.300 on the bars, so we were down by .225. We then went to floor and all of the women did very well with Emily Pritchard scoring a 9.900 and Carly Dockendorf a 9.95, for a team score of 49.350 to Arizona's beam score of 49.075, so now we were ahead of Arizona by .05. This was gearing up to be a real shootout. I want you to realize that it is extremely difficult to end on beam, especially at an away competition. We warmed up beam and prepared for competition. I was apprehensive because I knew that we would have to hit beam to even have a shot at winning the competition. Carly started us off with a stuck routine to score a 9.825, followed by Tacia LaBatte - 9.800, Chelsea Bakken - 9.800, Amy Metcalf - 9.900, Emily Pritchard - 9.975, and anchored by Molly Seaman's 9.950, for a team score of 49.450 to Arizona's 49.500 on the floor. After all the dust settled we had a very rare situation, we had tied Arizona, with Emily Pritchard winning the all-around with a 39.725. Both teams had a team score of 197.300, which is a very good score, especially on the road. For those of you that have never been in the competition arena I cannot express the exhilaration and emotions that enveloped our team as each athlete competed balance beam. The excitement built with each routine, capped off with Emily Pritchard, and Molly Seaman doing virtually flawless routines. I can tell you that they should have both scored a perfect 10.00, also this was the first competition that I can remember where we went 24 routines with 24 hits (24 for 24). Whenever you go into a competitor's arena you will have to be at least a point better than that team to win because of the home court advantage, and all I can say is that we rocked. This was probably the best away score we have ever had. This weekend we will host UCLA. UCLA hosted OSU this past Sunday and scored a national record of 198.875. That is absolutely amazing! We will need all of you Husky fans to be here at the Bank of America Arena, be LOUD, and cheer on your Huskies.
Here are our national rankings after this weekend:
Go Dawgs,
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