Advantages of traveling to meets?

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MaryA

Proud Parent
Proud Parent
I started to post this question in a different thread, but then decided that would be off-topic (where's my gold star, Bog?).

So, as I was saying in the other thread, since we're a new team this year, HC wanted to keep all of our meets in-state (previously we were at the Y where all meets were in-state), but that next year, once the booster club has gotten some fundraising done, she wants to take the team to some meet in Ohio (one state over), and then the year after that she wants to go to Chicago Style (650 miles away!).

I'm sure this will be very fun and that my daughter will be thrilled to essentially be going on vacation with her teammates (remember how she was convinced that if she left the Y she was just going to DIE from missing her teammates? Well, she loves the new ones just as much.). However, as the mother of a perfectly lovely gymnast who is not going to the Olympics or (probably) going to be recruited by NCAA colleges or any of those things, what is the advantage to going to meets that require taking time off school and traveling many hundreds of miles away? For top tier gymnasts who need to establish a reputation for themselves and get their names out there, I can understand it. But for the rest of us (We are the 99%! Shall I occupy the USAG headquarters?), is there really a point to it, other than giving us the choice between spending a jillion dollars to go or else having our children hate us because all of their teammates are going and we don't want to shell out the jillion dollars to go?

I need good answers here, so that, when the times comes, I can sell my husband on the idea! And Chicago in February? Really? I've heard there are lots of nice meets in Orlando.
 
My club went to Hawaii this year from Western Canada so that was quite a trip. The competition experience was a lot different. But the main reason we went was for a team bonding experience. With so many new girls moving up from the pre competitive classes I didn't even know half of the girls names, now I can talk to them and have so much fun even though they are so much younger than me.
It is possible that the club might want to go for the team experience.
We are going to Orlando next year for a meet! Should be great!!
 
Well for us last year was the first year for us at the new gym and the new gym only does the sectional, states and maybe a 2 others in the state all the others are out of state more than 2 hours away. some of the ones 2 hours or less we will drive to if its not too early in the am otherwise we do the hotel the night before. Others we have had to fly to rent a car and do the hotel thing - then we make a mini vacation out of it - its usually just my DD and me as hubby can't take all those days off work. At 14 its a great time for us - my DD loves doing the mini vacations with me (thank god) and she gets time too with her team mates.

In that season of traveling I too asked the same questions as my DD wasn't the best but not the worst either. Our Olympics would be a college scholarship but like you who knows if she will get one or not. Well as she gained more experience at these meets and was able to compete with others other than the same few gymnasts in her state she could see better what she needed to work on and where she really excelled. It gave her confidence in her sport to where now If she sticks with it I actually could see a possible college wanting her.

As far as missing school I had a talk with the principal and here teachers on this and they don't have an issue with her missing as she is an "A" student and works hard - they don't fear she will get behind and any work she is supposed to get done during that time they give to her and she works on it while away - Yes I make her take time to do the work or she can't go.

Also for me I see the travel as an opportunity to see the country and the tourist, and historic stuff out there. She loves going to historic things. Last year our big meet was in Washington DC well we took 3 extra days to be tourists and she loved it!! From NH that is a good diatance I can't believe some actually drove down and drove back (has to be a good 7 -8 hour trip) right after the meet.

For us this year we are going for our "biggest far away meet" to Parkettes in PA - and DD is very excited about that as it a Nastia Cup Series meet so there will be a day or two where she can go and see some of the better known elite gymnasts out there which gives her more motivation. But we will also do some site seeing when we go.

Do we have to go to these - NO - but it gives DD some great experiences, some fun travel and a lifetime of fun memories.
 
Our gym tends to do one travel meet a season but it is optional. There are also meets that are about 2 hours from us and while that is driveable in a day, if we have a 7:45 am check in, we stay the night before. Alternatively, if we aren't scheduled for awards until 8pm, we'll stay over as well.

So, meets that aren't 'travel' are still 'fun' for the girls...they LOVE the pool (especially if it was a night meet and they have the morning to swim) and they love the hotel breakfast buffet!

They love hanging in the room being together.

As for meets in Orlando in Feb, they are EXPENSIVE due to vacation so in a way while Chicago is cold, you might get more bang for your buck.

Bottom line, a few meets a year with a hotel stay can be fun and a 'reward' for all the hard work of the season :)
 
Ok, my daughter as you know is a Y gymmie. When she was littler and I saw all the "older" girls going to Nationals I thought, "oh they must be the real good ones", then I learned that nope, level 4s, 5s etc were going (when she was little I guess I had a different version of what a level 4 was lol). I said to myself no way would I ever do that! Well guess what! We go to Nationals and we love it! This year it was in Ohio, it was a 9 hour drive which was hellish IMO, but it is such a fun thing and the girls have a blast, and it is over the top if you really look at it (she was a 10 year old level 5) but it is fun. This year I believe it is in Wisconson and we will be going again. I did like when it was closer to home.

Would I be happy if a lot of meets were like this? No. I do tell myself the trade off is that I pay less for Y gym than I do for a club gym. I might not feel the same way if I was paying double what I pay now for training.
I started to post this question in a different thread, but then decided that would be off-topic (where's my gold star, Bog?).

So, as I was saying in the other thread, since we're a new team this year, HC wanted to keep all of our meets in-state (previously we were at the Y where all meets were in-state), but that next year, once the booster club has gotten some fundraising done, she wants to take the team to some meet in Ohio (one state over), and then the year after that she wants to go to Chicago Style (650 miles away!).

I'm sure this will be very fun and that my daughter will be thrilled to essentially be going on vacation with her teammates (remember how she was convinced that if she left the Y she was just going to DIE from missing her teammates? Well, she loves the new ones just as much.). However, as the mother of a perfectly lovely gymnast who is not going to the Olympics or (probably) going to be recruited by NCAA colleges or any of those things, what is the advantage to going to meets that require taking time off school and traveling many hundreds of miles away? For top tier gymnasts who need to establish a reputation for themselves and get their names out there, I can understand it. But for the rest of us (We are the 99%! Shall I occupy the USAG headquarters?), is there really a point to it, other than giving us the choice between spending a jillion dollars to go or else having our children hate us because all of their teammates are going and we don't want to shell out the jillion dollars to go?

I need good answers here, so that, when the times comes, I can sell my husband on the idea! And Chicago in February? Really? I've heard there are lots of nice meets in Orlando.
 
I'd also be interested in hearing the perspective of coaches and/or the people who set the meet schedule. What do you see as the advantage of taking your team to "away" meets (we don't have many gyms near us, so every meet we go to is 2 or more hours away, but I'm talking FAR away)' for the gym and for the gymnasts.
 
I really don't see the benefit at the lower levels. There is a gym near us that starting at level 4 they travel out of state for most meets. Our gym stays in state until level 7 and even then it isn't a guarantee that they go out of state. I think as a parent traveling far away at the lower levels creates a lot of burnout and unnecessary expense for the parents.
 
I really don't see the benefit at the lower levels. There is a gym near us that starting at level 4 they travel out of state for most meets. Our gym stays in state until level 7 and even then it isn't a guarantee that they go out of state. I think as a parent traveling far away at the lower levels creates a lot of burnout and unnecessary expense for the parents.

I guess its all in how you look at it. I personally love to travel in general so any travel I get to do I don't think it unnecessary and the expense that goes with it is fine. We usually don't just go for the meet we always try to do the mini vacation thing as opposed to taking 2 weeks in the summer. So the money we would have spent on a 2 week vacation at one location we spend on long weekends at many locations. The benifits other than seeing how other girls around the country compare (which is fun to see) is the time we spend together at some interesting locations. Its no more burn out than doing a bunch of local meet against the same gymnasts in the same 4 or 5 gyms. I don't think the burn out comes from traveling around but from long practice every day of the week at lower levels and too many meets when just starting out.
 
Pretty much all of our meets were travel meets. For early levels it's was still at least 2 hours just to Denver and 3-4 to Colorado Springs or Fort Collins (and all the suburbs in between, where 95% of the gymnastics in our state take place). We did a LOT of early mornings and a lot of planning around blizzards on the state's major thoroughfare "I-70" (the only way in and out of where we live to civilization pretty much). In optionals it was standard to have to drive 10-12 hours to most of the meets. But that's a trade off I think we make living in a fairly rural area, especially in a gymnastics perspective. We're close to... Wyoming? New Mexico? Utah? Not a lot of meets there. I think there's a few other parents from our neck of the woods who understand this. We would pack as many people as possible into the cheapest (but still clean!) hotel in town after packing the team up into a van with a few parent volunteers, or have families come for some of the bigger meets. These were our vacations though and on the plus side we saw some of the most beautiful scenery in the country and some of the most boring scenery in the country (no offense to western Kansas and Nebraska...) I wouldn't change it for the world. We didn't travel for big name meets at big name gyms but just for the love of gymnastics and to be at meets where there was reasonable competition. But I can imagine it'd be quite different if there were more meets close by. It can be done on a budget though if that's the choice you and your family make, don't think you have to break the bank traveling if the other families at your gym are willing to join in on the madness!
 
I think it should be saved for the higher levels where they need the travel meets to find adequate competition. It should be a delayed gratification for years of hard work.

I agree it causes burn-out and stress on some of the parents. I think when gyms decide to do this, they should think about the families on the team who are hustling to keep their kids in gymnastics already. If they want a team bonding experience, have a pizza party. Do a lock in.

We as a family are more than happy to pay for travel when it advances our kids' goals, but travel in the lower compulsory levels is pointless.

Now, I'm the first one to be calling up the Hampton Inn for a meet 2 hours away if somebody has to be there at 8am. Heck, I booked into a hotel for a swim meet this summer 1 hour away because it was a Friday morning start. Rush hour is hard and unpredictable here.

However, I know from past experience that required travel meets when there is completely adequate area competition makes me ticked off and makes DH very, very, very ticked off. A coach should not be able to dictate hour our family vacation budget is spent.

The other issue is how these kids come to think of themselves when they get these vacations and there hasn't been the years and years of work behind it. When their parents are coerced into paying for a luxury that the parents probably have never given themselves, and their siblings will never get to do. If there's years and years of work behind it, that's one thing.
 
My club went to Hawaii this year from Western Canada so that was quite a trip. The competition experience was a lot different. But the main reason we went was for a team bonding experience. With so many new girls moving up from the pre competitive classes I didn't even know half of the girls names, now I can talk to them and have so much fun even though they are so much younger than me.
It is possible that the club might want to go for the team experience.
We are going to Orlando next year for a meet! Should be great!!

Hmmm... Hawai'i might be a travel meet I could get behind... ;)
 
Our lower levels don't travel much--just one travel meet that the entire team goes to and that's billed as a bonding experience for the team. Other than that I think travel meets are fun. It's fun to get out of your house--go stay in a hotel with your friends, swim, shop, whatever. Like cher, I think travel is a good thing. When we went to a meet in Dallas a few years back, we visited the site where JFK was killed--the girls got to hear a talk there about the event. Do historic things like that happen all the time? Nope, but they still learn a lot by getting out and about.

That said, if money were a huge issue then I would talk to the coach about whether the meet is absolutely required. If it's the difference between eating that month or not, obviously the travel experience can be skipped!
 
We are a family who loves to travel, for sure. In fact, one of my husband's biggest complaints about gymnastics is that it makes it hard for us to go on extended vacations. However, I don't know if Chicago in February is anyone's ideal family vacation. And then there's the other daughter who already feels as though her life sometimes revolves around her sister's gymnastics. How will she feel if her vacations start to revolve around her sister's gymnastics too? I'm not really worrying about this all that much since this is all still only theoretical and is at least 2 years away and who knows if DD will even be doing gymnastics by then. I'm just throwing this out there as a general topic for discussion. I'm sure that, if she is still on the team, and they do go, that we will take her, because she would be devastated otherwise.
 
I'm used to doing the big invitational meets that mean out of state travel(plane, rental car and hotel) for optional levels only. It does get pretty expensive. Most of the bigger meets charge about $100 per girl to enter, then there is usually a team fee plus all the travel costs.
MaryA, this might be something to start discussing within your booster club. How much will they be able to contribute toward each girl's expenses for going to a meet in Ohio next year. Actually it isn't all that far off since registration for the big meets takes place in late summer/early fall.
At our gym the reasoning for going to out of state meets is so the girls can get the experience of being in big meets and compete against gyms other than the ones they would see just staying in state. Naturally the girls love the chance to be together and be in a hotel. As they get older and high school, it can be a real juggling act with missing classes and making up work.
 
we tend to stay pretty local. our travel meet so far has been in Savannah which we all love because it is so beautiful there. i think it isreat bonding for everyone. however, our team is small & we usually all go out to eat together after the meet anyway.
 
When dd first started, there was only 1 out of state meet on the schedule. Now, more than half are out of state. It's not based on level either. For the most part, the whole team goes (though they are never required - we can pick and choose which we go to). The HC/owner just feels the out of state meets give the girls a better experience. There are not many large meets in our state besides "states" so most meets are held in local gyms and often times you end up always competing against the same teams. It gets kind of boring seeing the same routines and the same girls on the podium all the time. Going to the bigger out of state meets opens the girls eyes to different styles of routines, different levels of competition (certain states are better than others in general), But it also gives much needed experience from an early age that competing in a huge arena is no different than in a small gym. This can be daunting to girls who have spent years in little gym meets to make it to optionals and suddenly be overwhelmed by the largeness of the competitions.

Personally, we like the travel. but we homeschool so we dont have the hassle of dealing with the teachers, homework, etc. And we both own our own businesses so we can arrange our schedules to make mini-vacations from the compeition weekends. Typically we try to plan something fun and something educational each time we go away.

Now, you do have to be careful though. We have been burned a few times by traveling pretty far away thinking it was going to be a big meet and it turned out there were only a couple other teams competing. I prefer the HC stick with just the really well known meets that we know are large year to year. Tigerpaw, flipfest, charleston cup, gamecock, etc.
 
I love to travel, but traveling like this would likely be just my dd and I - which would be fun, but what about the other 4 people in our family? Plus the expense and if we all go, then the other kids are missing their activities, which I don't like. Gymnastics is really expensive and the more travel meets the more expensive. I just don't think it is necessary until they get older.
 
DD's team meets are usually around 3 1/2 hrs away at most, but we don't really travel far for compulsories. The furthest one this year will be in Clemson in Feb (which I think is around 3 1/2 from us). I know that our optional team travels further, mainly to give them opportunities to compete against girls they would see again at Regionals. Now, they are going to Orlando in February- wouldn't mind going to that one, LOL.
 
The whole team goes to one out-of-province competition a year- 6 hours away. If our Level 2's (a bit like level 5/6) do exceptionally well, they may go to Atlantics which takes place in either Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and I think PEI.

I love the out-of-province meet that the whole team goes to because we all bond a ton. We all stay in the same area of the hotel, so it's easy to organize things. What's more fun than a team pool party!? We all get ready together, which is fun for us and the moms like it since they get us ready together. We all bonded with our coach too. It was nice for us-and her-to able to talk with her about things other than gymnastics. Everyone loved the experience!

Bonus- if you can't do pretty hair, it will be much easier to get someone else to. My mom loved that!
 
The whole team goes to one out-of-province competition a year- 6 hours away. If our Level 2's (a bit like level 5/6) do exceptionally well, they may go to Atlantics which takes place in either Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and I think PEI.

A maritime Canada meet would be another one I could get behind... But only if it was in the summer! When we traveled up that way (before children) I was ready to pick up and move to Halifax. LOVE it up there!
 

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