Hello all,
I got some fantastic advice here a while ago, so I'm hoping to be able to ask your thoughts on something new, if that's okay.
My daughter has a competition coming up in a week or so. We are in the UK and her birthday is 28th Dec. 2009. This means that although she has just turned 9, she will compete in the 10-11 age category, because this calendar year she'll turn 10. All fine. Except that her coach thought, because she is quite small (according to daughter- seems like a bit of an assumption!), that she'd just turned 8 and therefore would be competing in the 9 year old age category.
The problem with that is that apparently the two groups vault at different heights. She now has to vault at the higher height next week, and she says she can't do it at all. Tried it for the first time tonight and can't get over at all without support, she says. It's not a vaulting table, it's a mat stack, and the vault is just a handstand flatback, which she has been doing very well at the 9 year old height, so I suspect not being able to do it at all is more of a psychological thing. Similarly, I'm sure that if she had more than a week to practice at the new height, she'd manage just fine.
Problem is she's both very cautious, and hates/is afraid of failure. If she can't do this vault at the competition, I know how much it will upset her. But I know going for something she perceives as much harder under pressure, without a lot of time to get it right will upset her too, and make her less likely to manage this vault.
To my mind, a good solution would be for the coach to spot the vault in competition, as getting a lower score would bother her much less than not being able to do it in front of a room full of people. However, the coach has said she'll be unable to do that on the day, as she'll be somewhere else on the competition floor. I do wonder if this has been said more as an attempt to encourage my child to just go for the vault, rather than actually the case, as it seems a bit unusual...
But I'm now unsure of how to best help my daughter plan for this, and work out how to shake it off if it does go wrong- at the last competition, she crumpled into a little heap on the ground and burst into tears straight after presenting for floor because she was so nervous/afraid, and the competition up until that point had gone well!
I have never met the coach who stays in the gym part of the gym before/after my daughter's class. I'm sure I could ask to speak with her about this, but I don't want to draw my daughter's attention to it even more, or fan the flames of her worry about it!
Can anyone offer any advice? What do I do?
I got some fantastic advice here a while ago, so I'm hoping to be able to ask your thoughts on something new, if that's okay.
My daughter has a competition coming up in a week or so. We are in the UK and her birthday is 28th Dec. 2009. This means that although she has just turned 9, she will compete in the 10-11 age category, because this calendar year she'll turn 10. All fine. Except that her coach thought, because she is quite small (according to daughter- seems like a bit of an assumption!), that she'd just turned 8 and therefore would be competing in the 9 year old age category.
The problem with that is that apparently the two groups vault at different heights. She now has to vault at the higher height next week, and she says she can't do it at all. Tried it for the first time tonight and can't get over at all without support, she says. It's not a vaulting table, it's a mat stack, and the vault is just a handstand flatback, which she has been doing very well at the 9 year old height, so I suspect not being able to do it at all is more of a psychological thing. Similarly, I'm sure that if she had more than a week to practice at the new height, she'd manage just fine.
Problem is she's both very cautious, and hates/is afraid of failure. If she can't do this vault at the competition, I know how much it will upset her. But I know going for something she perceives as much harder under pressure, without a lot of time to get it right will upset her too, and make her less likely to manage this vault.
To my mind, a good solution would be for the coach to spot the vault in competition, as getting a lower score would bother her much less than not being able to do it in front of a room full of people. However, the coach has said she'll be unable to do that on the day, as she'll be somewhere else on the competition floor. I do wonder if this has been said more as an attempt to encourage my child to just go for the vault, rather than actually the case, as it seems a bit unusual...
But I'm now unsure of how to best help my daughter plan for this, and work out how to shake it off if it does go wrong- at the last competition, she crumpled into a little heap on the ground and burst into tears straight after presenting for floor because she was so nervous/afraid, and the competition up until that point had gone well!
I have never met the coach who stays in the gym part of the gym before/after my daughter's class. I'm sure I could ask to speak with her about this, but I don't want to draw my daughter's attention to it even more, or fan the flames of her worry about it!
Can anyone offer any advice? What do I do?
