That's right! To all you loyal followers, (5417 hits to be exact...just figured out how to install the site meter..YES) with the holidays over, and the '00 (?) decade drawing to a close, we've come to the mutual decision that this weekend is a choice moment for the re-instatement of our beloved Junior National Team sculling blog. Among many reasons, this weekend top girls AND boys from all over the country have come here to lovely Tempe, Arizona (my home!) to partake in the first step towards the new 2011 Junior National Sculling squad that will compete in Eaton, England. In addition to that, this pool of athletes will be part of the system of selection for the newly-instated Sculling High Performance group that will train in Germany along side the German National Team.
After spending nearly 10 weeks living at training camp on the East Coast with the summer rowing family, I'm personally SO excited everyone's finally all out here! Not only that, after months of being so far away from everyone we're finally all rowing on the same water. Things are already eerily similar, as all our out-of-towner's have piled into the homes of various rowers on Tempe Junior Crew, my club and the local patrons of the boathouse-under-the-bridge. As our team is small, everyone is having an extremely comraderous couple days. Here in the Heywood House we have the famous, Lizzy Youngling, Katie Rosoff, Alex Zadravec, Mo(nique) Howard, Dale from Florida, Hannah Solis-Cohen, and Serena Boccara. Needless to say, it's cozy!
After long awaited reunion with G-man at the airport on Thursday, and a brief tour of the Tempe area, a climb up a giant rock ("A" Mountain, specifically if you're wondering) and my favorite sandwich place, we met up with our unusually large group and newly re-appointed coaching staff. There were a lot of young, new faces, and as always it's not only great to see everyone we know, and love but the rapidly growing pool of hopeful's for this year's 2011 team. As a side note, I would like to take a moment to recognize the coaches who we ALSO know and love, and will be the fearless leaders throughout this whole process. Returning as the head coach for the Junior Women's sculling, and taking on the challenge of Men's Junior sculling as well, we have the noted Guenter "G-Man" Beutter. Dan Duxbury, the much-loved chief of the Tempe Juniors, will be filling the role of coach for the new Berlin-bound High Performance scullers. We're also extremely lucky to have with us again Richard Klein (unfortunately not with us this weekend, much love and good luck with the surgery!) and Matt Naifeh who will be coaching the Junior Men's squad and the CanAmMex Group respectively.
Arizona's mountainous, mars-like appearance, and crystal-clean air (sarcasm, for those of you not from here!) has thrown many of our East Coast friends into a little bit of a climate-shock, but nevertheless we showed up promptly at 8am for our first workout of this extended weekend, a nice post-christmas 2k. After a short after-test row in various line-ups we all caravanned over to a lecture hall at Arizona State University for a seminar outlining the Junior National Team standards, and technique from G-Man, and a talk on goal setting by Wil Heywood. G-man used a few practice pictures from this summer for a small what's-what in both good and bad technique, and it gave a few of us a little nostalgia, but as always it's on to new things!
As it's still SO early in this whole process, I just wanted to get the ball rolling, and let everyone know that regardless what happens I'll to my best to keep the blog updated! It's already evident that the team system has become significantly more streamlined, and as a result the coaches have set up an official blog that will provide updates throughout the next couple months for everyone looking to be competitive in the 2011 camp system (http://usjntsculling.org/) YES!
This is only the second night, so there's not much else to say so far! Just that we're missing everyone who either could not make it this weekend or graduated out of the system altogether...and that we're definitely ready for sleep, but what else is new! Hope you all didn't get sick of reading this summer, because hopefully there'll be a lot more to come!
And as always, good luck to all the athletes competing here and training at home!
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