With the 2015 American open in our rearview and the National Championships closer than I'm comfortable with, I want to take a second and review all that happened in Reno. Power and Grace took eight lifters to compete in this year's American Open. Including myself, six of those eight lifters competed in the A session for their respective weight class. Many of them challenged their personal records. Many of them broke those personal records. A couple of them found themselves on the podium.
Our preparation for this year's American open was one of the better training cycles we've had the opportunity to do. As a team we have not had the chance to do a long, strength biased training cycle in preparation for a National meet. We've been preparing for this one since August. That amount of time allowed us to do a lot of really rare things inside of the training cycle. Much of that work was evident in platform performance.
I could not be more proud of how our team finished and looking back I wish I had actually put in a women's team to compete. I believe we would've done fairly well. Below is a list of the men and women who competed under Power and Grace (including myself though I am on Texas Barbell). These folks worked their tails off of for this meet and I could not be more proud of their performance. As I told many of them throughout the weekend, my love and loyalty to them has little to do with their performance but on rare weekends like this one, where we have some pretty incredible performances, it does make a coach smile a little bit bigger. Check out how we did below:
Women:
48 kg A Session – Meghan Valentine: 61kg Snatch, 76kg CJ, 5th place finish
53kg B Session- Christmas Abbott: 68kg Snatch
53kg A Session- Jourdan Delacruz: 77kg Snatch- 2nd place Snatch, New Youth and Junior American Record
58kg A Session- Sarabeth Phillips: 87kg Snatch- 3rd place Snatch, 107kg CJ- 1st place CJ, 2nd place total finish
63kg C Session- Cherisse Taylor: 79kg Snatch, 85kg CJ, 37th place finish
69kg A Session- Jilly Jaworske: 81kg Snatch, 95kg CJ, 12th place finish
Men:
77kg A Session- Kevin Schmitt: 125kg Snatch, 151kg CJ, 11th place finish
77kg A Session- Spencer Arnold: 131kg Snatch, 154kg CJ, 6th place finish