Courtney's Gymnastic Meet

Courtney's gymnastic meet was on Sat. July 12. It was at the MAC (Multnomah Athletic Club) in Portland. We got there right at 9am when the warm ups started. Little did we realize that there were limited seats (only chairs for a about 1/2 of the audience) - so we had to stand the whole meet from 9am - 1pm (next time we know to get there early). Dayton did pretty good - considering it was a very long day for him and he is very young still. Grandpa and Grandma Coates kept him entertained. There were 4 teams participating for the morning session (which was the compulsory competition). In the afternoon was the optionals. It would have been fun to watch the optional as there are a lot of older people competing in the optionals - but there was no way that Dayton could have survived longer than 1pm. Luckily some family nearby brought a bunch of cars for their boy to play with & they let Dayton play with them too (I brought two cars with us - but that was not nearly enough to keep him entertained for four hours).
Courtney competed in the Level 4 age 9 to 11 year old group. She did really well for her first competition. She was competing against older girls who had competed before. (I later found out from her coach the MAC team (one of the other teams there) had it's USA gymnastic competitive league competing - which is a bit of a disadvantage for us since the team Courtney is on now is more of a rec team not a competition team and doesn't practice nearly the hours that the competition team practices or doesn't compete weekly like the competitive teams do - her coach was upset about that) - However it was still a good experience for Courtney. She didn't get any gold medals or ribbons - but it'll give her something to work for next year (if we are still here). At first she was nervous(as you can see from her face in one of the pictures below) -- but she warmed up & did all her routines (vault, bars, beam, & floor) very well.


Getting ready to compete



Courtney's team



Courtney's team marching in (she is second in line)



Courtney's team showing off their ribbons & gold medals



Doesn't she looked terribly worried?? Jitters-



Grandpa entertaining Dayton



Dayton playing with cars

Don brought his camera & took lots of pics of Courtney practicing and doing her routines. Here's a sampling of them (there's lots).