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I'm John Bacon at the Donald R. Shepherd
gymnastics training facility,
where they have 16 Big Ten titles hanging from the rafters,
15 with coach Bev Plocki.
The question is, how do they get so good, how do they stay there?
To find the answer, we'll talk to Bev Plocki and her athletes.
But part of the answer you can already see: and that is simply
"practice, practice, practice."
Becky Bernard has done the routine how many times on that beam?
It's countless.
I wouldn't even know how to be able to come up with a number.
I mean, these athletes, from the time they're young,
train and train and train.
They've done ultimately thousands of times.
You know, during our season, we actually train less physically.
Your body kind of goes on auto-pilot,
but it's 90% mental at that point,
in terms of being able to handle the pressure and being on a four-inch
wide balance beam and being able to continue to think about the things
that you need to think about and not be distracted by the 3,000
people in the stands or anything else that's going on around you.
How do you create the false pressure here that they're going
to need in order to compete at Crisler and elsewhere?
It's a challenge.
I'm constantly trying to come up with new ideas and different
ways of putting them outside their comfort zone.
Sometimes we play very very loud music to distract them.
Sometimes we turn the music off and make it completely
silent so you can hear a pin drop.
We invited the hockey team to come to a practice.
They were allowed to taunt them,
they sang other schools' fight songs,
and they just did different...it
was fun. Becky, tell us about your uneven bar routine.
I guess for bars there's a lot of mental that goes into it
because there's a lot of shaping and just nitpicky stuff.
When you're doing a flip in the air, trying to grab the bar again,
what's going through your head?
My coach always tells me to make sure my head's in,
and I'm looking at my feet.
You want to stay as tight as you can because if you grab
the bar when you're loose then bad things can happen.
Tell us about the Urchenko Half. It's a new vault;
it starts out at a 10.0 [difficulty].
You've got to build up a lot of momentum to run down the
runway and get a strong block off the horse and then think
about twisting pretty late and wrap your arms tight.
Sounds easy. Is it? Absolutely not.
It's taken me quite some time to learn this.
I've been working on this since probably August
and finally got it like a month ago.
And I keep training and missing it in competition,
but hopefully this weekend I'll get it. What's your goal this year?
Our goal remains the same pretty much year after year.
The first thing is always to win the Big Ten championship.
That's a conference pride thing and that's something
that's very important to us that we never look past.
And then beyond that, going to the NCAAs.
And ultimately we have not reached our ultimate
goal of winning a National Championship yet, so that's definitely it.