Welcome back, Pioneer Fans!

I am Kelsey Nixon writing to keep you posted on how our team is doing in the gym and with our weekly team activities. ?

October is a month full of annual TWU gymnastics traditions. This week has been yet another busy week. I cannot believe October is almost over. Time sure does fly when you are having fun. Practice has been very productive and we continue to improve every day. We are definitely living up to the theme, ROCK-TOBER, the well-known October slogan.

This week started with one of our annual team traditions. The tradition is known as “Secret Spook.” For those of you that do not know, Secret Spook is similar to Secret Santa, but happens around Halloween. Each gymnast picks a name out of a cup. The picked name will be her secret spook. Starting last Tuesday, we each got a little gift each day at practice. The final day we got our big gift. The week was a week full of treats, and goodies. ? Secret spook week is always a fun week because walking into the gym everyone is so excited to see what the next gift is going to be.

Friday ended up being a pretty long day for the team. We had practice from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. followed by our Nutrition information session. At 4 p.m., we showed our school spirit by going to the TWU Soccer game. The game was against the Northeastern State River Hawks. It was also the breast cancer awareness game so we all got decked out in our pink attire. After the game we got about an hour break to go buy some cookie dough for another TWU annual team tradition we like to call “Cookie Night.” Cookie night is a night where we spend hours baking a BUNCH of cookies. To give you an example of what a BUNCH of cookies looks like, picture this… 18 girls who each brings 1 to 2 break and bake cookie sheets or their favorite cookie recipe. That is A LOT of cookies. ? What we do with these cookies, you are probably wondering. Well, Sunday night we have our annual skit night. Each class puts together a skit and we perform for the rest team and coaches. After we finish our skits, we watch them and eat the cookies. Ok, maybe not ALL of the cookies, but we sure do put a dent in the pile.

Thanks for keeping up with the TWU gymnastics team. Stay tuned to read about our adventures next week.

Kelsey