It was the first time she's ever done it. She hadn't even practiced it in practice. We just signed her up and said go for it. There was nobody in (the race) and so see what we can do, and she came off and did very well.

I had a lot of positive things happen for each athlete. And the kids seemed really happy about the results, too.

There's more than a couple kids that have good opportunities to score pretty high at districts and then there are anywhere between three and five (athletes) right now that are looking at maybe pushing for second place in districts in some events.

We're out there to teach. If we stop talking to you and stop saying you're doing this wrong and you're doing this right, then we've given up on you. We've got a lot of energy, and we've put it into every kid.

Women have always had to earn their freedom.

We've been advocating that this year in order to avoid people going into nursing homes. We think that if we had more home- and community-based services funded in this state that would prevent much more costly expenditures down the road.