Hey Terps Fans!

What a crazy fun month September has been. I cannot believe it is just about October, boy does time fly when you are having fun! This week was full of fun stuff, but especially the weekend. This weekend was recruiting weekend and it was definitely one of the best yet! First, on Friday we had a shortened practice as well as a shortened spin!! Every once in a while Brett will do his "Make a Deal" with us. This past Friday he "made a deal" with the freshman.  Each of them had to perform certain skills under pressure on first tries, or do skills for the first time and if they did 30 minutes would get knocked off our spin time to give us an extra half hour to get pretty for our recruit dinner. I want to give a huge shout out to each one of them, Karen Tang, Katy Dodds, Elizabethe Manzi, Jessie Black and Ebony Walters who all showed us what they are made of when put under pressure! Thank you guys! As I mentioned we had to get pretty for our recruiting dinner. Every year we take a trip to Baltimore's Inner Harbor for dinner. Everyone looked absolutely beautiful and we all enjoyed a spectacular meal.

The fun continued on Saturday as well. Our agenda consisted of a tailgate before the football game, the football game against Florida International, and to end the night a Jersey Shore party. We were blessed with warm weather that was even too warm for most of us to handle. This football game was also the Student Athlete Honor game, where all athletes with a GPA of 3.0 or higher were honored and got to walk across the field at halftime.  After the game everyone returned back to their place to shower and get ready for the awesome Jersey Shore party. We had pizza, dressed like characters from the show and played Pauly D's music, and took a trip to Rita's Italian Ice.

This morning it was sad to say goodbye to all of the girls because we had such a blast with them all weekend. The weekend added with a great touch because this week there is NO BOOTCAMP! It is a great opportunity for everyone to get some extra rest, caught up with school work, and push extra hard in the gym to get some more super duper gymnastics done! I cannot wait to see what this team puts together in the gym this week when we are all fresh and ready to go. We looked fabulous while sore and tired I am almost scared to see the "fire" we bring this week. None the less we will be RELENTLESS through it all! Have a wonderful and blessed week everyone! Thanks for reading!

Hey Terp Fans,

            My name is Karen Tang and I'm a new freshman at the University of Maryland. I'm so excited to start my first year and join the Terps gymnastics family! All the freshmen and I are having a blast living together! We've had such a good time decorating our dorms! We've become such great friends! We are all excited to work together and show what we got in the gym!

            Everybody has been training so hard! Us, freshmen are trying to keep up with our very first boot camp, but we manage to push through! The team has been so encouraging! We're ready to kick some butt this year!

            As freshmen we have to attend study hall for six hours a week and all of us have gone above and beyond with our hours! We care a lot about our education as much as we care about gymnastics! We make sure to get in there and get our work done!

            Also, all the freshmen were so excited to receive all the gymnastics apparel! It's like Christmas all over again! We got so many leos, shirts, shorts, hoodies, and a ton other stuff! That's all we were to class now! We love it all!

            This first month has been amazing! I'm so excited to see all the new and exciting things to come during the season.

Thanks for reading!

Sept. 14, 2010

Welcome back, Terp fans!

Wow! I can't believe another year has started!  We are all so excited to welcome five new freshmen and a new assistant coach, J.J. Ferreira, to the Terps gymnastics family!  Our first few weeks of school are now under our belts and we are really starting to get back into the grooves of college life.  The girls and I got through our first week of boot camp (in one piece) and everyone is already working very hard in the gym!  It's so great to see everyone already eager and ready for our preseason practices!  This is the most intense and excited I've seen this team in a long time! 

This weekend the whole team went to Jennifer Iovino's house for a BBQ and to celebrate her 21^st birthday!  Her parents made so much food for us it was all so delicious!  We spent the night enjoying each other's company and watching some exciting Sunday night football games!  Thanks so much to the Iovino family for having all of us over!

Gymnastically, this team is proving to be stronger than ever!  We've started working on skills and preparing for harder assignments in the weeks to come.  Everyone is looking so great already!  The energy and team spirit in the gym has been so encouraging and motivating.  It is already evident that Terps gymnastics is going to be a threat to any team we compete against this coming season. 

I know you all are excited for our new episodes of Gym Terps TV! Keep an eye out for the first episode featuring all three coaches: Brett, Erinn and J.J.!  A big thanks to Becca Pang for all her hard work on putting together the videos!

Thanks for reading!

Kelsey McDermid