Hello Dawg fans!
We are extremely close to the start of our season and the Washington Men’s Gymnastics Team could not be more excited. We will be traveling to Illinois, Minnesota, Arizona twice, New Mexico, and Florida for our away meets this year. In Illinois, we will be showing our skills alongside some NCAA teams in Chicago at the Windy City Invite. The rest of our competitions will be in the GymACT conference which continues to grow, adding one new team this season. We will also have two home competitions this season. The annual Washington Open on January 6th and a dual-meet vs. ASU on March 3rd. The dual meet will be held in conjunction with our UW Women’s Gymnastics Team which should prove to be exciting and fun for both athletes and spectators. If you are able to attend any of our home or away competitions, we would greatly appreciate your support.
This year is my first year as Head Coach of this amazing team. I am beyond thrilled and extremely honored to help lead this team! I have a human-first coaching philosophy and my main goal is to help each athlete individually become the best versions of themselves and reach their full potential both in and out of the gym. Our assistant coach Bob Young is keeping his role; I look forward to working with him and also learning from his experience and expertise. I already feel we work well together, and we have developed training plans for the season that will help foster our team’s development and help us reach our season goals.
Joining me in my inaugural year, we have four new freshmen that will each add their own specific contributions to our exceptional team culture and competitive spirit. Our four new athletes are: Judah Hirschman from Seattle, WA, whose favorite event is pommel horse. Jack Miller is from Seattle, WA, and has some unique skills on p-bars, and floor exercise that might contribute to the team score this year. Joshua Lutz is also from Seattle, WA, and is working hard to build his skills on floor exercise to contribute to this team. Adrián Facundo from Elmira, OR, is expected to shine on floor and vault this season and is building his skills in the all-around.
Our Team Captains this year are Bradley Stroud (Junior), Trevor Ruggeri (Junior), and Andrew Layman (Senior). Each brings his own unique style of leadership to the gym, and all have already proven to go above and beyond for their team and to help our coaching staff lead this team.
We will have some stand-out routines this year with some very difficult and unique skills. However, it is difficult to predict who will certainly be making the lineup for each event as we have so many who could put up some great routines. This summer and fall the guys have been working hard to increase their difficulty and reduce their execution deductions. We have hit every team goal so far in practice, and are now fully in our competition cycle which means we are constantly cranking out routines trying to increase our hit percentages.
We have a lot of challenges and big competitions ahead of us, but we are excited to conquer these and strive to be the best versions of ourselves and reach our full potential as a team.
GO DAWGS!!!
Eli Richardson
Head Coach – Washington Men’s Gymnastics Team
