By AVIS HIXON
Tiger Co-Captain

With our final home meet coming up on Friday night, we are looking forward to a very busy weekend.

Friday night's meet in the Towson Center will be the final home meet for our seniors and this will bittersweet for the five of us. For me, Kacy Catanzaro, Alyssa Dittman, Lindsay Poplaski and Kady Sullivan, it will be the last time we compete at home. I'm sure it will be a very emotional night.

We will have Saturday off then go to George Washington University on Sunday.

Last weekend, we competed at Rutgers University and it was the earliest we had to leave for a competition this year. The bus pulled out at 6:45 a.m.

A lot of our families were able to make this trip. We had an even larger cheering section than usual, thanks to Kacy's family and friends. We also have a lot of gymnastics alumni from New Jersey and they came to the meet, along with their families.

After the 30-minute general stretch, warm ups were different. Normally, we have 15 minutes to warm up on each event and 2 minutes to transition events. However, at Rutgers, we were given a continuous 16 minutes on each event and we were allowed to move on to the next warm up event once we were ready. This made warm ups go by much faster.

We had an ideal rotation schedule because we got our harder events done first and we ended on our stronger events.

Starting on bars, we had a few unusual mistakes but overall we still did well. Sammy (Lutz) started us off with a 9.725 score and she placed fourth. Alli (Antenucci) ended the line up with a 9.775 and took third place.

There were some solid performances on balance beam but unfortunately we did have a fall. But, Kacy took first place with a career high 9.875 score.

On floor exercise, Alyssa had the opportunity to try out a new tumbling pass and she made it. Kady is making her comeback from her broken hand she exhibitioned and made her routine as well.

We ended on vault, one of our better events.  We had an amazing set with stuck landings from Britney (Russell), who placed fifth, Lindsay, who took second and Kacy, who won with a 9.875 score.

During the whole meet, it was very close between us and Rutgers. But our performance on vault enabled us to pull out the win by 0.25 points. After the meet, we celebrated our win as they celebrated their seniors.

Alyssa gave this week's Courageous Tiger to Lauren Ross for being such a solid performer on beam. She has yet to fall in competition.

We had a nice trip back to Towson after our satisfying win. We ate at Panera Bread and watched "Breaking Dawn - Part 1" on the ride home.

Friday night will be an emotional night and we're hoping to have a big crowd.