Arrowhead Gymnastics Surges Despite Injuries

Freshman Sabrina Ferro on the floor routine at Arrowheads invitational on Saturday, January 21st, 2017.

Freshman Sabrina Ferro on the floor routine at Arrowhead’s invitational on Saturday, January 21st, 2017.

The Arrowhead Gymnastics team hosted their invitational at the North Campus West Gym on Saturday, January 21st. It was one of the biggest meets of the season with seven schools competing. Schools competing included Waukesha, West Bend, East Bend, Whitefish Bay, Sun Prairie, Appleton, and Arrowhead. The team from Waukesha, composed of athletes from the varying Waukesha schools, ended up winning the meet with Arrowhead finishing second.

“As the season has progressed, people’s scores have been going up, which is good; however, injuries have increasing too. With the quality of certain people’s routines improving, our confidence and our motivation as a team has gone up, but with all the injuries, cancels out some of that confidence unfortunately,” says junior gymnast Caitlyn Kleczka. “On Saturday, there were some key members sitting out, which led to a loss of some good scores. Since that was the case, we had to swap some people into events they usually wouldn’t compete in. For example, some people who have never competed on the vault in a meet had to try it out Saturday, and that actually turned out not as bad as I would have thought.”

Another noteworthy event that occurred at Saturday’s meet was the premier of a new addition to Arrowhead gymnastics varsity team: Lexi Woida. Woida, a sophomore,  had up until recently been an athlete in the JO (Junior Olympic) program at Hartland’s Midwest Twisters gym.

Due to a back injury during Arrowhead’s diving season, the gym owners at Midwest Twisters expressed that they no longer wanted Woida in their program due to possible confedentiality issues that could arise if something drastic were to happen to her in a meet or at practice.

The Arrowhead gymnastics team’s coach, Bob Pulkowski, recruited Woida to the team. She went on to win the uneven bars event and come in second in the All-Around competition on Saturday.

“With [Lexi] being added to the team roster, that’s helped with the team’s confidence because we can now maintain high scores despite all the injuries people on the team have,” junior gymnast Sophia Gritzmacher said.

On Thursday, January 26th, the team will go to Mukwonago High School to compete in a smaller meet that includes Arrowhead, the combined team of athletes from Mukwonago and Kettle Moraine (abbreviated as ‘MKM’), as well as the Waukesha team. The meet will be the second time this season that Mukwonago has hosted a meet. The other instance was on December 15th, 2016, and was exclusively a competition between Arrowhead and MKM.

“For the meet on Thursday, we need to find people who haven’t competed on certain events yet due to other people being injured. There’s also going to be people moving from exhibition [athletes whose scores don’t contribute to the team score] to JV events and people moving from JV to varsity on other events. Seeing how that plays out will be a good time for some people to step up and reach for a higher spot on the team because of others injuries. This is in part due to the situation that the JV injuries have been just as degrading as the varsity injuries. In my opinion at least,” Gritzmacher said.