With the Japanese team in the gym last week, I’ve gotta say that it was extra motivating and fun during training!  It was especially nice to be able to get some feedback from my old coach, Mutsumi!  He’s an extremely technical coach and it’s always nice to get his perspective on how to execute different skills.

After a week of training at Stanford, the Japanese guys joined in for a tri-meet against Cal and Stanford.  Although there were a few mistakes from each team, the Japanese team ended up taking the win!  Pretty impressive considering they only brought seven athletes!  In college, you can compete up to 15 athletes and put up 6 of your best guys on each event with the top four scores counting.  Since the Japanese team only brought 7 guys, that meant they were only able to rest one guy per event.  Either way, it was an exciting night and I hope they had a great experience being able to compete in front of American crowds.  I know from experience that Japanese meets could be very quiet.  However, college meets in the US, are the exact opposite…super rowdy!

Before the meet: Stanford-Cal-Japan

Me and the Japanese Team after the meet!

Luckily, this time around, we were able to finish the week off without any major accidents or illnesses.  Like I said in the last post, there was a guy last year that had to be taken to the ER. Nothing like that this year.

The team left early this morning so they should be back in Japan by now.  Good luck to them in the training and future competitions!  Also, thanks to Mutsumi for the super sweet backpack (picture below)!

Cool Mizuno backpack with the Japanese flag!