On Saturday, January 28, the Forest Hills gymnastics team traveled to Kenowa Hills High School to compete against multiple opponents in the Kenowa Hills Invite. 

The team worked on everything the best they could. The girls honed in on minor improvements from the more critical details to the more minor details. 

“On Friday, we did a lot of routines focusing on little aspects of our routines such as eye contact with the judges, connecting our jumps better, and cleaning up our landings,” said senior captain Charlotte Stephan, “even the littlest things can boost our scored quite a bit.” 

Combining the skill work with the energy, the girls’ adrenaline was pumping, and their blood flowed. Another senior captain, Abby Cummings, explained how the environment felt. 

“The energy was pretty high, especially because we were going into invitationals! Invitationals are big meets with a lot of hard competition, so we were all both excited and nervous,” she said.

These emotions produced some pretty decent scores. On vault, sophomore Claire Worth received a score of 8.8; Claire also acquired a score of 8.05 on beam. On bars, Seniors Abby Cummings and Lauren Wolffis secured scores of 7.65. Abby also pulled through with a score of 8.35 on the floor. 

These various scores helped the team secure a place of 6 out of 13 teams. Despite the ladies performing amazingly, their opposition still had a leg up on them. 

“Our opponents had some really clean routines, fewer falls, and overall they just made fewer mistakes than us, which in the end really makes or breaks our standings,” explained Charlotte, “We were missing a few key people who consistently score pretty high, so that also hurt our team score quite a lot.” 

Although they did not achieve the best turnout, the ladies still competed their hearts out. Abby was more than happy with how her team did.

“I am so proud of how our team did! Invitationals are long meets that both mentally and physically drain a gymnast. However, we fought hard and kept the energy going in the midst of a long day,” she exclaims, “We had a bunch of regional qualifying scores on every event, which is always one of the goals going into a meet. I am especially proud of the girls who are competing in events for the first time, including sophomores Chloe Flowers-Stiles and Harper Scott. They both competed on vault for the first time!” 

Flipping into future competitions, the girls will work on bringing their all. The team will focus on showing up ready to compete, and all the ladies will push themselves to maintain their performance confidence.

The team will be traveling to Lowell on Monday, January 30. They will compete against the arrows at 6:30 p.m.