On Saturday, January 14, the Forest Hills Gymnastics team faced off against multiple opponents at the Lowell Invite. The ladies placed 7th out of 14 teams.

In preparation for the meet, the team put in lots of effort and time; the girls were at practice every day after school, working as hard as they could.

“We did a lot of different kinds of routines, such as back-to-back routines to work on endurance and routines with the teams throwing things and distracting the other teammates to work on our focuses,” says sophomore Chloe Flower-Stiles.

Taking everything they prepared into the meet, the girls were still a bit unsure about the competition to come. 

“Our hopes were pretty medium-average mostly going into the meet with the goal of getting qualifying scores and trying new upgrades in our routines,” says senior Maddy Bachert. “The energy felt somewhat off at first, but with all the support of our team, we ended up feeling great and positive energy throughout the duration of the meet.”

The positivity and practice granted the team some pretty decent scores; sophomore Claire Worth scored 8.95 on the vault while both juniors, Jia Niemeyer scored 8.4 on vault, and Addison Hoxworth scored 8.475 on the floor. Senior Abby Cummings scored 7.7 on bars. 

The girl’s competition was pretty tough. The other teams had another level of performance and skill.

“Some of our opponents just have a bigger pool of people to work with,” Chloe explains, “for example, Rockford has a larger pool of girls which means more gymnasts can score high. Most of their gymnasts come from many years of gymnastics. Many of the girls on my team don’t have that experience.”

Despite not placing the highest in the meet, the girls were thrilled about their performance. Reflecting on everything, junior Addison Hoxworth is more than proud of the team.

“The team overall did amazing. I could not be happier about our performance. We did better than we expected, despite knowing the hard teams we were up against. We all most certainly reached our goals.”

Looking forward, the ladies will strive to beat their next team score. Regardless of the small time in between competitions, the team will be practicing and grinding the most they can. On Tuesday, January 17, the girls will be traveling to Rochford High School for their next competition. They will be going head-to-head with the rams at 6:30 p.m.