Youth looking for experience on MI gymnastics squad
Published 1:26 pm Tuesday, December 1, 2009
If youth is known for strength and age is known for wisdom, then the Mercer Island High School girls gymnastics team is looking for a little bit of both.
The team, under returning head coach Lenny Lewis, has a lot on the youth side of things, and is hoping to gain the experience this season to make up for whatever it may be lacking on the age side.
“We still have a very young team,” said Lewis, who will make the 2009-2010 season his 21st coaching year. Four seniors are returning from last year’s team, which finished fifth overall at districts.
Lewis said that, overall, he expects the Islanders to have a strong floor squad, making it one of their best events. But he added that he would like to see more depth on the uneven bars.
“We’ll probably come out with at least five decent bar routines, but it would be nice if we had some girls challenging each other to be better on bars so that way we’d have a strong bar team,” he said. “It’s usually our weakest event. Bars has always been bad mojo for us. It’s the most difficult event and it takes a lot of upper body strength, and you have to be a really good gymnast to score well.”
Despite this, Lewis said his goal for the team was to qualify as a whole for the district event in February.
“I let them know my goal was to make districts as a team,” said Lewis. This season, both 4A and 3A teams will compete for the KingCo title, which in the past was separated by classification. For Lewis that automatically makes the competition tough, as schools like Bothell, Woodinville, Newport, Issaquah and Ballard have large squads, filled with girls who have years of club gymnastics experience.
“There is just no way for us to beat that,” he said. “Our competition to make 3A districts would be Mount Si, then Bellevue. Liberty only lost one girl last year, and we squeaked past [them] to make districts. So those two teams and, of course, Sammamish. But they beat us last year, too. Those are the teams we have to beat before going to districts.”
While Erika Reutimann and Kendra Johnson, two of last year’s seniors who helped lead the Islanders, are now gone, Lewis was confident that those holes would be filled.
“We should be able to replace those two girls on the events that they were the strongest on,” he said.
Despite having 50 girls turn out at the beginning of the season for the team, Lewis said he wouldn’t be making any cuts, but rather would hold separate practices for the various squads.
“Everyone is pretty healthy so far,” he said. “It’s going to be an exciting season. We have a lot of talent. If we can tap into it, we should be able to do pretty well. We have a lot of girls to choose from; I just need the time to spend with them, and it’s not going to happen in one practice.”
The team kicks off its season with two away meets, going from Roosevelt on Dec. 3 to Bothell on Dec. 10, before the Islanders host their first home meet on Thursday, Dec. 17, against Bellevue.
