Hi everyone! It has sure been a busy past couple of days!

Last Friday, we took a short trip over to Indianapolis during our lunch break for a blanket drive. One of our teammate's brothers recently fought cancer and he started a blanket drive in Las Vegas to help keep fellow cancer patients warm. We were very honored to be able to continue his efforts here in Indianapolis for the Peyton Manning Children's Hospital at St. Vincents. In just over an hour, we collected 20 blankets and $240. The following day, we purchased 17 more blankets bringing our total to 37 blankets! A group of us were able to go to the Children's Hospital to deliver the blankets to the patients there. It was an incredibly fun, rewarding trip, being able to talk to the kids and brighten their days. We are quite thankful to be able to give back to our community!

Yesterday started the first official day of practice with all the other countries! It was super fun to be able to meet some of them at dinner last night! We'll be able to show our hospitality and get to know the other girls over the next 7 days. Competition begins on Wednesday; the time has come! It's here and we are READY!

U - S - A
U - S - A
U - S - A
USA!!!!!!

HOME STRETCH!!!

Hello everybody!

We all came back from our short break re-energized and even more excited for Junior Worlds. It was so nice to go home and be with our families and friends who have given us so much support throughout our time training.

Today was our last day working out at the St. Vincent Sports Performance Center before the big meet. They have been a great resource throughout our training, and we want to thank them for everything.

Tomorrow is our first day training at the IUPUI Natatorium! We can't wait to jump right in and make that pool our home for the next week and a half! We are having an exhibition on Thursday and we hope to impress all those coming to watch and cheer us on!

If any of you are able, we would love to hear you all cheering and showing your USA pride at Junior Worlds next week. The tickets and schedule are available online on the USA Synchro website (usasynchro.org).

We can't wait to see you all soon in Indianapolis!
Much love, The 2010 USA Junior World Team

Congratulations to all of the competitors at US Open!

Hi everybody!
Today was a very exciting day in Indianapolis! In addition to our training, we got to go downtown to the USA Synchro National Office for a delicious lunch. There we met some important individuals who help promote, organize, and support US Synchronized Swimming - Terry, Janice, Jennifer, Taylor, Jordan, Elizabeth, Kevin, and Will The Intern. They bought us a very delicious, healthy lunch and we all sat in a conference room where we got to know one another a little bit. We talked about the exciting plans for Worlds as well.
After practice tomorrow, most of us are heading home for the weekend to see our families and friends, and to recharge for our last three weeks here together. So far Indianapolis has been a blast and we are looking forward to seeing you all at Worlds! Thanks again for all your support!!

Dinner!!

We are now staying in a hotel in Indy, and since we no longer have the campus cafeteria food that we had in San Antonio, we are making our own food! Our wonderful coaches have been giving us cooking lessons and we've made some pretty great meals! And we thought we'd share some with you!

Last night we made stewed chicken with:
- 1 can of stewed tomatoes
- 1 can of black beans
- 1 can of kidney beans
- chicken breast
Cook the chicken in a skillet and add the can of stewed tomatoes. Mix the two cans of beans in a pan and heat over medium heat. When the chicken is cooked, add the beans and enjoy a yummy meal! (we ate it over some brown rice).

We have had so much fun cooking ourselves! We also made tilapia and sweet potatoes tonight! Not only are we learning a lot in the pool, we're learning in the kitchen too! =)

US Open!!

It has certainly been a fantastic past few days! We survived the 100+ degree Texas weather and made a great showing at US Open! We took gold in the Junior Solo, Duet, and Team competitions and silver in Combo to China's National Team I.

It was a great honor to have support from our Senior Team I and to be able to watch them and cheer for them as well. It was also awesome to see and get to know the three Canadian club teams that came out to Texas. One of the highlights of the meet was watching the Chinese National Team's Combo to Alice in Wonderland! It was truly incredible!!

We had an early flight this morning and are now settling down in Indianapolis for the second half of our summer. We're half way done with our journey, but the best is yet to come! Congrats at Opens USA! We're going to keep this momentum moving forward through the end!

As day 2 of US Opens comes to a close, let's give a huge shout out for Alexa!! She competed her solo today - both prelims and finals - and swept away all the competition! What a great way to start off the meet! Yesterday, we all competed in figures and showed a great improvement since trials, just a month and a half ago. We are all excited to see such progress because we're only half way through our journey together!

We have started off having a great meet, and will continue tomorrow with the duet and combo! Aly and Alexa will no doubt represent tomorrow and we will continue that momentum through the end of the day when we compete our combo for the first time, to represent the United States of America.

Let's go get 'em! USA USA U - S - A!!!!

Here we go!

We're all packed up and ready to head off to Irving in the morning! We had a mini exhibition this morning and we preformed all our routines as if it were competition and we are psyched to compete them for real!

We're packing up three minivans and caravaning 5 hours to Irving tomorrow morning. It is going to be a bitter sweet departure because we have had such a great time here in San Antonio, but we are so excited to turn the page, and start up a new chapter in our journey together!

Good bye San Antonio! Thank you to all the wonderful staff of UIW, including Emily V! We'll miss you!

Hi everyone!

This weekend we've been packing for Irving and enjoying our last few days in San Antonio. We are super excited to compete in our first meet as the United States Junior National Team!!

Our VP for marketing contacted us this week to see if we were interested in being part of the Ellen Degeneres Show. Now we are putting together pictures of our team with Ellen's face to send to her. We hope to be on her show to gain as much support as possible for USA Synchro.

We are also going to help with Michael's Blankets for Cancer. This is a blanket drive that Katie's younger brother started as he was fighting Burkitts Lymphoma, a type of cancer. His goal is to collect 1,000 blankets. We hope to help him reach his goal by collecting blankets in partnership with St. Vincent's in Indianapolis.

All in all, we have had an amazing time in San Antonio, Texas, but can't wait to begin our second half of training in Indianapolis, Indiana!

Now, as we head to US Opens on Tuesday, we thank you again for your support. Yeah USA!

Happy (belated) Fourth of July from all of us here in San Antonio!!

Whew! Can you believe we're already starting on our 5th week of training?! The time has flown by ...

As US Opens is quickly approaching, we are continuing to work hard on our routines and figures and are getting very excited to show them off at the meet next week!

Last week, we battled it out against the weather as Hurricane Alex swept up to the coast. As the hurricane turned into a tropical storm, we were hit pretty hard with some stormy weather! When the storm passed, after practicing in oddly cold Texas weather, the Texas heat and humidity returned, giving us some nice color (tan for some, but red for others!)

Though we've been training hard, we still took time to celebrate the 4th of July! We all went over to Kim's house for a delicious dinner, hilarious team games and, of course, some fireworks! Nicole also took us to the River Walk in downtown San Antonio where we had a nice team dinner.

Three days into our 5th week training together, we're all doing well, in great spirits, and gearing up to show everyone what we've got! Thanks for your continual support, we couldn't be here without you! GO USA!!

Jr Team Pushups

Check out our Jr team cross training!

Hey from the Junior National Team! First and foremost, this has been one of our hardest weeks...HELL WEEK! We are working on endurance, patterns and precision. Today was a pretty epic for our team! We arrived at a pool and we couldn't see the bottom, we stayed in until the staff told us it was unsafe, because the PH and chlorine were unstable. We made the most of it by spending the time landrilling our routines. We found another pool we could practice at... so across the campus,over the highway bridge and to another campus we went. In that outdoor pool we battled bugs and crickets, but ended up having a very productive practice! Did I mention it was raining the whole day? (our coaches got soaked)

Nothing will stop our team from getting the job done!! We'll show you what we got in 12 days at US Opens, hope to see you there!

Hi again!!!!!! In a recap of last week's training, we continued working on our awesome, high energy routines! Our routines are now completely finished and we are striving to excede the expectations of people in the international world and in addition, each day, we try to excede what we, as athletes, think is our limits. As far as figures go, we had a little mock figure meet a few days ago. Since trials, the coaches and athletes felt like we have all improved immensely at figures in the figure meet. And we all have continued to make fast progress since the figure meet. So all in all, our figures are improving at a very fast pace!
We got presents on Wednesday too! We all now have our USA attire(bags, polos, sweats, shorts, caps, goggles, noseclips, towels, and suits). We are so excited and grateful for everything we recieved! We have also had some visitors so far. Margo's mom came and was very kind driving us places! This weekend, Morgan and I(Aly), are spending some time with our grandparents! Yay!
U.S. Opens is coming up in two and a half weeks and we are all so excited to debut our powerful routines and breathtaking figures;)
''Now... as a team... we swim forward. Inch by inch, stroke by stroke... WE CLIMB!''

Hello from the Junior National Team! So far we have finished our first week of training and things are looking up. We are all looking forward to our training together and building as a team. We wanted to share with you some of the goals we have. As we all know, we are representing our wonderful country, the U.S.A! In doing this we will come to Junior Worlds prepared mentally, physically, and every other way possible. We will also be proud of what we are coming with... This includes awesome, exciting, clean, original routines and improved, higher, slower, more extended figures. All in all, we have come into this training knowing we have a shot to blow people away and impress people and be proud of what we are bringing to the international synchronized swimming table. Well my friends, we are taking this shot and giving it all we have! This will be a team effort including, the athletes, coaches, manager, our families, U.S.A. synchro judges and officials, and of course all of our support from everyone in USA Synchro! Thank you all for checking in with us and we will update you on our journey this summer!
Let's do this team and fight for it!
GO USA!!!!!!!!

Welcome Everyone

Please feel free to post well wishes, notes of encouragement etc as we update you on our journey!