BCGA's top level 10 gymnasts Emily Barrett and Reagan Hemry returned from the prestigious Junior Olympic National competition in Dallas, TX gaining new experience and making notices for themselves.

Emily's competition featured eight different age groups from the eight regions across the country where in total 450 girls participated.  She competed in the “Senior A” age group where she also represented the Region III team.  Emily had great performances throughout the competition where she executed a new floor routine featuring a pike double as a dismount.  On vault she performed successfully two 10.0 start value vaults-Yurchenko layout half, and a Yurchenko layout full as a second vault which she nearly stuck.  On bars, perhaps the nerves got to Em, and she had a fall on her mount and had to restart her routine from the beginning, but from there on she managed to complete the exercise nicely. She finished on her strongest event, beam, where she was sturdy and earned her highest placement of the competition for 12 th.  Emily's solid all around competition earned notices from various college coaches with the strongest interests coming from the University of Missouri and Stanford!

Reagan, Sally and Emily during JO National Banquet

Being the first alternate for her age group “Junior B”, and, therefore, not taking part of the main Junior Olympic National event, Reagan was invited to participate in the JO National Invitational Tournament, which was held at the same site. Reagan competed against girls from all eight regions with many of them entering from the strong elite clubs of All-Olympia and Gym Max from Southern California, Texas East and Champion Texas from Texas, east coast’s Parkettes and DeVeau’s and others. Reagan had an outstanding day hitting four for four routines. She performed her strongest floor routine of the season with a double pike mount and 2 ½ twists dismount. On the other three events she performed very cleanly which resulted in two fifth places (bars and beam) and eighth place in the all around!

This was the first national competition for both Emily and Reagan! Congratulations girls and good luck with your summer training!