The Georgia gymnastics team is currently away from the comfort of Stegeman Coliseum for several weeks.
As reported in The Red & Black, after scoring 197 or over in its last three home meets, last Friday the Georgia GymDogs embarked on the first leg of their three-week road trip in Gainesville, where it upset No. 3 Florida and concluded the meet with a 197.45, its highest away score of the season by over a point. According to the GymDogs, their strategy for continued success is how they have been traveling with portable components of a typical home competition including maintaining their pre-meet routine, creating their own version of a home-crowd atmosphere and remaining focused in spite of road meet changes. “This whole year is going to just be a growth process for them in so many ways,” head coach Courtney Kupets Carter said. “One of them is bringing the energy and comfort they feel in Stegeman, [taking] the fan energy, how fun it is, to an away meet, because it’s very different.” Before any competition, the GymDogs bond with pre-meet preparations that include listening to rap music to get the athletes hyped up. “We keep our music going and our joking around and helping each other,” junior Sabrina Vega said. “It keeps us normal.” Besides the travel, the away meet adds pressure to the competition since the gymnasts notice little to no enthusiasm from crowds cheering for their opponent, which is why they create their own support base on the floor. “We definitely try to bring the energy from Bulldog nation to the away meets,” freshman Rachel Baumann said. “We cheer as loud as we can, just try to dance, have fun, get loose, but also try to focus in on ourselves, keep a bubble around the team.” Some of the most notable differences between a home meet and an away meet are the shifts of the event order. When Georgia’s at home, it starts on vault, then rotates to bars, beam and floor. In an away meet, Georgia begins on bars moving on to vault, floor and beam. Baumann, who competes on both floor and beam, it’s almost irrelevant which event comes first. “[On] floor, I like to bring the energy,” Baumann said. “But I also like to be fierce, and I like to be the same on beam. So for me, it’s not as much of a transition, but more of like ‘OK, do what you need to do to focus on the beam, what you need to focus on floor.’” Kupets Carter sees the value in the long stretch of away meets for her team’s development, as they keep showing improvement away from home. “We get one [away meet] after the other,” Kupets Carter said. “They are ready to go on the road. They have all of those little pieces in their belt now in terms of readiness… It’s the end of the season where they’re confident in their gymnastics, so the scores will be where they need to be away.” Call Pachuta Insurance Today @ 706-769-2262.
0 Comments
Any first-year student may have a hard time navigating campus, but international students coming to the University of Georgia may encounter more challenges during their first week of school.
As reported in The Red & Black, that’s when the Department of International Student Life has jumped in to help make the transition as smooth as possible through their World Leaders Program. During international student orientation, world leaders welcome all new international University of Georgia students by providing guidance when exploring a new campus and new country. Sai Nagula, a senior coordinator at the Department of International Student Life at UGA, who was born in India but moved to the U.S. at a young age recognizes the challenges that international students deal with as they transition to a new culture during their college years. “I definitely understand that it’s a lot more challenging as an international student to come to the U.S. … because you’ve spent most of your life in a certain country and now you’re trying to adjust to the U.S. system and the U.S. culture,” Nagula said. “Personally, I think [international students] have it a little bit more challenging as students, whereas I came at a young age.” Nagula remembers how he got involved with ISL and the World Leaders program in his first year at UGA. After seeing an announcement for the program, he decided to apply for a position. Nagula served as a World Leader and a Senior World Leader. Justin Jeffery, the director of ISL, said the program places current students as a peer resource for international students that are enrolling at UGA each fall and spring semester. “The students that are World Leaders are the most closely situated to the realities of what it means to be a UGA student,” Jeffery said. “Many of our World Leaders are international students, so they have that proximity to the reality of what the international students that are incoming are going to experience.” Jeffery said World Leaders are picked in January and go through training until they serve their primary role providing guidance to international students during the international student orientation. He calls this job a “lifetime commitment,” hoping that the students who take on the responsibility of working in the program understand the long-term peer connections being made in the process. “And that’s what usually brings people in, with the interest is that they are generally interested in not only helping people, but they want to create a connection that spans more than even their UGA career,” Jeffery said. Noor Khan, a UGA sophomore studying health promotion, is one of this year’s World Leaders. She said she learned about the program while working as an office assistant for ISL. “Through ISL, I kind of seen how we interact with students and what kind of opportunities we give them,” Khan said. “I really liked and appreciated the kind of efforts [ISL] puts forward for international students.” Khan also said as a World Leader, she hopes to be a guide for international students and to be there for them as a resource. “You play an important role in their transition, from coming from a foreign country and having to adjust to, not just the United States life, [but] specifically Athens, Georgia,” Khan said. “You help them realize … they also belong here, they also have a role to play in this community.” Call Pachuta Insurance Today @ 706-769-2262. Over the weekend on Feb. 10, a fire consumed the two-story Theta Chi fraternity house in Milledgeville, which ended up displacing Georgia College & State University students who lived at the residence.
As reported in The Red & Black, the 10 residents were able to escape the fire unscathed, but the house had significant damage and much of the fraternity members' belongings were destroyed, according to the Milledgeville Fire Department. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, according to WGXA. The Theta Chi chapter at UGA addressed their support for their brothers in a national statement shared with The Red & Black. “The Fraternity is grateful to the large number of individuals who have already reached out and asks that all keep the men of the Iota Xi Chapter at Georgia College in their thoughts tonight and in the days ahead,” the official statement said. Soon after the fire, there was an outpouring of support for the fraternity in which Pi Kappa Phi member Blake Cavender organized a fundraiser with a $1000 goal, which was surpassed. Cavender said he has kept raising the goal to encourage more donations. Since the GoFundMe was posted on Sunday, the fundraisers have received more than $28,000 in donations from the community. “The support they have received has blown my mind and is absolutely amazing,” Cavender said about Theta Chi. Students and community members offered their consolation and spread the word about the fundraising efforts all over social media. Call Pachuta Insurance Today @ 706-769-2262. Over the last nine consecutive semesters, enrollment at Athens Technical College has grown, the college reports.
As reported in The Athens Banner-Herald, the latest spurt was in this spring semester’s enrollment with a 4.1 percent increase over spring semester of 2018. Since summer semester of 2016, there have been year-over-year increases, when 2,165 students enrolled, which was up 2.2 percent over the 2015 summer semester enrollment. The college, which services 11 areas including Clarke, Elbert, Greene, Hart, Madison, Morgan, Oconee, Oglethorpe, Taliaferro, Walton, and Wilkes counties, calculated its annual economic impact to more than $118 million and 2,535 jobs in the 2017 fiscal year, according to an analysis by a private company, EMSI. Of that total amount, $85.6 million is attributed to Athens Tech alumni in the area. Partly dependent on the economy, technical college enrollment can go up when people lose jobs during a recession as many seek new job skills in technical colleges. Athens Technical College President Andrea Daniel established a committee to increase enrollment in 2016 witn strategies including raising community awareness of Athens Technical College, new financial aid programs and increasing dual high school-college enrollment and other “recruitment opportunities.” As of 2018, nearly 40,000 Technical College System of Georgia students were pursuing associate degrees. That’s almost four times as many as in 1999, according to a report by the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. The numbers of students in diploma and technical certificate of credit programs was about the same as the number in associate degree programs and the number in diploma programs as of 2018. Overall, 2018 enrollment in the 22 colleges of Technical College System of Georgia was more than 137,000 students, according to a report by the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. Call Pachuta Insurance Today @ 706-769-2262. |
Pachuta InsuranceWelcome to our blog! We hope you enjoy it. Archives
February 2020
|