Oregon acrobatics and tumbling coach Chelsea Shaw thinks the team’s loss to Hawaii Pacific could be a good thing for her team. The loss marked the second this season, the first time in program history the team has lost two meets.
With one more regular season meet left – a trip to Baylor this Sunday – Shaw thinks the team’s eyes were opened after the second loss.
Shaw discussed the team’s loss and the upcoming meet against Baylor with the Emerald.
You’ve had a little while to let the Hawaii Pacific loss sink in. What are your thoughts on your team’s performance?
It wasn’t our best meet, but it definitely wasn’t our worst meet. The kids are improving in a lot of areas. I think officiating has been extremely inconsistent but you can’t blame the judges for the loss. We lost because maybe we weren’t the better team on that day. I think coming away from it, the girls have a really good attitude and they’re fired up. The good thing is you can go into the tournament ranked eighth and come away with a championship. It doesn’t really matter what’s happened up to now, it’s going to matter when we get there.
You can take away lessons from every meet. So, what would you say is the takeaway from the loss to Hawaii Pacific?
For our team? I think they need to practice harder and pay attention to the details. I think I mentioned this before, but we need to get more consistent. They’ll come a way from one meet and fix something, but then they might mess up something else. So, it’s a little bit inconsistent, but they need to go into this championship – not only the Baylor meet, but the championship – hitting everything, the best they can. They came in this week and have worked harder than they have every before and they’ll continue to hopefully do that the next two weeks and then the season’s over before you know it.
After you lost to Baylor you talked about lighting a fire. Now that’s it has been some time, do you think the fire is still lit?
Yeah, it’s way more lit than it has ever been before. It was going to be really lit after the Baylor loss, and it was, but I don’t think they would ever lose twice. In the program’s history, they’ve never lost twice in a season. I think it was an eye-opener for them, but I think they’ve learned a lot from it.
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