NCGA E-Newsletter March 12, 2002

Greetings to all:

This past weekend the NCGA ran it's Regional Championships and what a pair of meets they were! Friday night at Gustavus, the host team won the Midwest Regional over the defending champion LaCrosse in a tight meet. The all-around was also won by a Gustie, newcomer Amanda Parker who overtook defending national champion Melissa Stanton. In the East, it was SUNY-Cortland who had the best meet of the day and took the title over the host Ursinus College. Ursinus' Kristen Grimmel won the all-around over MIT's Merritt Tam in a close all-around battle as well. There is a detailed account of the East Regional meet and I hope to be able to put up a similar account of what happened at the Midwest Regional. We'll also be putting up the teams and individual qualifiers to this year's Nationals to be held at Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY, on March 22nd and 23rd. By next week there will be a 'Preview' of the Nationals posted on the website as well. It promises to be a great meet and a real showcase of how far the NCGA has come in recent years.

I also wanted to pass along some sad news in case you haven't heard, and ask your support in favor of the men's and women's gymnastics teams at U-Mass which are slated to be dropped at the end of this year. U-Mass has a long tradition of excellence in gymnastics and many of our current coaches and judges have graduated from that program. It has been a bad year overall for college teams as we are losing programs from Cal-State Santa Barbara, University of Vermont and the University of Massachusetts at the end of this school year. Please check out the website set up to support U-Mass to find out how you can help - UMass The trend is not getting any better and pretty soon all of our programs could be in danger of extinction if this continues. Personally I am sick and tired of watching this happen and I will be taking some steps to prevent this from happening in the future. More on that later, but if you have any ideas or comments about how we may be able to insure the future of collegiate gymnastics for generations to come, please feel free to e-mail them to me at eduardo@mit.edu

Please check our website for updates and stories. I promised myself to keep this short for your sake, so I'll say so long for now.

Best regards,

Eduardo

"No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth" - Robert Southey