"From the Vault" is a column by Penn State women's gymnastics head coach Steve Shephard.

March 29, 2006
Sorry it has been a while since my last entry, but we have been very busy with the team working hard to try to reach our goals. The last couple of meets have been very up and down for our team. We have been struggling with some of our team members trying to stay healthy, and the wear and tear of the season has been tough to deal with. The team has done a great job with all of this however, and I¡¯m sure many other teams are feeling the same way we are right now.

The Big Ten Championship was a tough one to deal with in particular. We started on the bye before beam, and had to count a fall on beam, which put us behind and forced us to play catch up. Minnesota started on beam, and they rocked it. When Michigan self- destructed on beam, we knew the meet was close between Minnesota and us. We fought hard and had good performances on floor, vault and bars. Unfortunately it wasn¡¯t enough, and we ended up third behind Minnesota and Michigan State. We were out of first place by .175, and MSU beat us by .05. MSU came from behind and put together a great floor rotation to move ahead of us.

We are thrilled to be traveling to LSU for the regional meet. We really feel confident that we can compete with these other teams, but we have to be at our best. The athletes are pumped, and they have renewed their commitment to do everything in their control to succeed. This season has been a tremendous growth experience for our team. They have experienced the highs and lows and have learned that success in life is not what happens to you, but how you react to those events. We all hope to make a big statement at the regional championships and compete up to our potential. If we do that we feel confident that the outcome will be favorable!! For now, we¡¯re off to Baton Rouge!!

February 27, 2006
This is the team we have been waiting to see all season. We finally put it all together!! I was very proud of this effort by our team against Ohio State. They showed poise and control, and did the job on Saturday night. I was particularly proud of our beam team. We knew we had a good meet going as we came to beam. I knew they wanted to hit and were feeling the pressure. They had a great performance on beam. Steph was up next to last and she fell on her front aerial. Mer was our anchor, and really needed to hit to ensure a good away score for the team. Not only did she hit but she rocked!! She scored a 9.975 and should¡¯ve had a 10.00!! It was great to see her come through in the clutch. All season we have been preaching to the team to just do your job, and good things will happen. Saturday night they did just that. We had our season high score, and we did it without Lisa Clark. Lisa has been nursing a heel bruise for a couple of weeks now, and we decided it would be better to rest her. When we get her back into the line up we should be even better! We head up to UNH this weekend, and we are hoping to drop the 193.55 we are still counting for our RQS which should move us up a bit in the rankings!

February 13, 2006
Wow! I can¡¯t believe how fast the season is going by. We are already half way through our competitions. This weekend we have off from competition, but we are planning on having an intrasquad on Saturday in order to stay in the routine of competing.

The past couple of meets have been a great test of our team. We went up to Minnesota a couple of weeks ago and lost to them. As I told the team however, what is important is not so much the win or loss, but the performance you put together. When the team hits to the best of their ability, we have to be satisfied with whatever the outcome is. We are not in control of the judging and the scores. Sometimes you get a 9.9 then the next time, that same routine may go 9.65. We can¡¯t worry about that!! What we need to focus on is the actual performance. If you performed to the best of your ability, and you did what you normally do in practice, or even better, then we all have to be satisfied with that. We don¡¯t need to vilify our competition in order to get fired up to win! That is not our approach. We focus on the things we have control over, and try to compete with calm confidence realizing that the other team has nothing to do with our success or failure.

When we went to Arkansas it was a reunion of sorts since Rene Cook is one of our Alums. She graduated from PSU in 1993, and both Jess and I coached her all four years. Mark and Rene were wonderful hosts, and it was great to see what a tremendous program they have created from the ground up. Our team didn¡¯t have a great night. We weren¡¯t terrible, but we still were making too many little mental mistakes. Things that we don¡¯t usually have trouble with were rearing their ugly heads, and causing deductions! We didn¡¯t stick any vaults, our bars were sloppy, we counted a fall on beam, and floor was mediocre. We still have lots of room for improvement. We came into beam realizing that the meet was on the line, and it could go either way depending on our performance. We counted a fall and still managed to come out with a win, but we were disappointed in the performance.

This past weekend against Nebraska, Yale, and Rutgers was our last home meet. We honored our seniors, and put in an OK performance. We stuck two vaults, and had better amplitude on the others. Our bar routines were a bit shaky for our team. Again, we had lots of short handstands, and some execution errors. No one fell but we can do so much better!! Beam was shaky as well. We stayed on, but we are capable of doing much better. Our performance on floor was very good. Lots of nailed landings, really good dance and presentation, characterized our routines. Nebraska basically gave us the win since they counted a fall on beam while we were on floor. I told the team that this meet could have gone the other way very easily if Nebraska had hit beam, and we would be feeling very differently about the night if it had. We still need to be more mentally tough. We need to compete with more confidence. I saw a glimmer of it on vault and floor against Nebraska, and now it¡¯s time to put it together on all four events!

January 20, 2006
We have our first meet under our belt. It was nice starting out at hom and having a big and friendly crowd. The official figure was 2,857, but it looked like more to me. They have a tough time counting everybody who comes in, since a lot of people come in a bit late, and I think they stop counting after the meet gets started. The team did fairly well for our first meet. We made a few uncharacteristic mistakes, but overall there were no major surprises. As a matter of fact, when Jess, Duke, and I scored the girls in our last intrasquad, we scored a 194.4 . This is our baseline now, and we plan on improving from here.

We have some video highlights from the meet on our web site now. We are going to try to get some footage from each meet to put on the web site from now on.

The focus for our meet was to treat it as a celebration of our abilities. They are in fact so tremendously gifted, I wanted them to appreciate that gift and celebrate it through their performances in competition. I didn¡¯t want the team to feel pressure or worry about any expectations. I wanted them to feel joy, pride, and gratitude, for the once in a lifetime opportunity to represent Penn State. I also spoke to the team about trusting the preparation we have gone through. They have worked so hard and are so well prepared, it was important for each of them to be confident.

Both Alabama and Arizona were very good teams. I was impressed with what I was able to see when I wasn¡¯t focused on our team. I thought the judging was good also. We only inquired on one routine and got the scored raised since the judges missed an element that affected the start value.

This weekend we have Michigan, West Virginia and Cornell. We are home again and hope that we run the meet a bit better and we do some better gymnastics as well. See you in Rec Hall.

January 9, 2006
It has been a long preseason filled with many ups and downs. The team has been working diligently since August to prepare for the upcoming season. We have high goals and have made significant improvements in difficulty, execution and consistency. The team is well prepared physically and mentally and they are ready to compete at the highest level.

Kristal Uzelac has decided to retire from gymnastics and has withdrawn from the University. She has moved back home to Johnstown and is helping out at her parents¡¯ gym. This was a very tough decision for Kristal, but after doing some major soul-searching, she decided that she just wasn¡¯t happy with gymnastics and school and felt that she needed to move on with her life. The team has responded to this loss by stepping it up another notch to make up for Kristal¡¯s absence. We will all miss her and wish her the best as she moves forward with her life.

We also have lost Gena Shingle for the season due to surgery on her shoulder. Gena had the surgery in the middle of December,and is just now starting to be allowed to move it. She will dedicate herself to a great comeback for her senior year next season.

The rest of the team is doing great! We still have good depth and the ability to go 9.8 plus from every person in the lineup, and even some of our backups are capable of that score. The new rules actually work in our favor since we have already been doing that level of gymnastics.

On vault we have nine deep with 10.0 start value vaults. On bars every one of our athletes has a D or better release move, and E level dismounts. On beam, four out of six have three element acro series and we are training three double back dismounts. On floor we have three full ins, and Mer is still training her double lay out. We have two Rudi combination passes and three athletes are doing whip to double back. Three of the girls are dismounting with double backs as well.

All in all we are ready to show the country that we are a team that is hungry and ready to compete with the best teams in the country. See you at the meets!

October 13, 2005
It¡¯s hard to believe it is already the middle of October!! I know the team is looking forward to having the weekend off. The University is closed this Friday for a study day before mid terms, and we have decided to give the team the weekend off. They deserve it after the grueling preseason we have gone through so far. The team has been doing strength at 7:00am Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We have also been doing spin cycling on Thursday at 7:00am, and sprinting after practice in the afternoon on Tuesdays.

The team has managed to be productive in the gym as well. We have a number of them doing full bar routines without a dismount, and all of them doing full beam routines. A couple of them even hit 8/8 on beam this week in practice. We bought the new vault table last week, and the vaulters loved it. They were flying!! Duke, and I also rebuilt our Sratum Floor, so now the team is even more productive on floor.

Last weekend was a very exciting time to be a member of the ¡°Nittany Nation¡±, when the football team beat Ohio State. Our team was very excited about the game. Ashley and Steph even got to be on TV, since they were in the front row of the student section. They shared a tent in ¡°Paternoville¡± with a bunch of other student athletes waiting in line to get the best seats. It was a wild weekend!!! Having ESPN¡¯s Game Day, and ¡°Cold Pizza¡± shooting on campus just added to the excitement.

We have new video up on our web site!! After trying for two years, we have finally done it. We will be updating it frequently during the year. The clips that are up there now are from last year.

We will be running to the top of Mount Nittany today instead of practicing. It is a tradition that we started a few years ago, and the team loves getting to the top of the mountain. It symbolizes our season, one of struggle, and hard work, but the view from the top is worth it!!!!

September 21, 2005
Well, another exciting year is under way here in¡±Happy Valley¡±. Our team started school on August 30th. We started our 8 hrs. of conditioning and voluntary gymnastics that week. Our goal is to get the team in great shape and then gradually work up to full routines by the end of November. The girls have hit the ground running due to the fact that they all trained on their own this summer. They have all made a commitment to step it up a notch this year in order to take our program to the next level. They have all come back to school in better shape than they left!!

We have been strength training with Brad Pantall, our conditioning coach. He has put together a plan that includes traditional ¡°gymnastics¡± strength along with classic weight lifting exercises which we do Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7:00am. We are also doing anaerobic sprint training on Tuesday and Thursday at 5:00pm. This training includes our traditional wind sprints up Shortlidge hill in front of the gym, and some interval training in the gym, as well as sprinting up the Eastview Terrace stairs! We call them our Rocky stairs!

The team is super motivated, and we have our sights set on a ¡°Super Six¡± finish this year. We all realize how difficult this will be and we are up for the challenge. We lost Kate Stopper and Cecile Allen to graduation, they accounted for four routines from our NCAA lineup. Kate was back in town this past weekend for a visit. She looked very different since they dyed her hair blonde for her part in the movie ¡°Stick It.¡± She is doing an internship at her old high school working with at-risk students. Kate hopes to go on to grad school after she graduates this fall in re-hab counseling. Cecile is doing her student teaching in Altoona where she teaches kindergarten. I¡¯m sure there are a bunch of 6 year old boys who have a crush on Miss Cecile!!

We had a great year recruiting!! We had official visits the first three weekends in September, which fortunately were all football weekends! This worked out very nicely for us, and we will announce our signees that have given their verbal commitments to us in November after the signing date.