Gymnastics!

Today's sports adventure: a women's gymnastics meet at BGSU. Yes, that's now two weekends in a row that we've attended a sporting event! Along with hockey, we've been meaning to check one of these out, and our schedule for today unexpectedly opened up to allow us to go. We weren't sure what to expect, but we had a great time! Plus, they don't charge for admission, so it was free, which is always a plus for me.

There are four events: uneven bars, balance beam, vault, and floor. It's organized so that the two teams alternate on two separate events: for example, we started on vault, and the other team on bars. One of our people went on vault, then one of theirs on bars, until each team had 5 people compete. Each person received an average score (out of 10) from two judges. Does that make sense? Each set is called a "rotation" (there was an announcer explaining things, so we were able to figure out a lot more about the system than we did at the hockey game, which had much more limited announcing). There were big screens up front posting the scores as they came in. The two teams were pretty close all the way through, but the other team won by eight-tenths of a point.

After the main competition, there was a little exhibition by a group of 4 male gymnasts called the "High Flyers" who did a cool tumbling set, including some stunts where they jumped and flipped over one or more people (at the end, they set up a mini-trampoline, and one guy bounced on that and flipped over 8-10 people--pretty impressive!). Also, between rotations, they tossed out t-shirts, and in the last round of those, one basically landed right in my lap! (Better than smacking me in head! :-) To close the event, there was a brief awards ceremony where they announced the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place individuals for each apparatus (I think that's the term...), then the all-around, then the team (which we already knew from the screens).

We decided that we'd probably like to go back to another one of these, though this year's season is almost over. If we're someplace with gymnastics next year, I think we'll check it out again!

We only took a few pics, just to document being there, so here they are. (Obviously, we're still figuring out how to use the camera well--all the action shots are blurry!)