Cheer Competitions

Hey Everybody!

I hope everybody's week has been better than mine has been. I hate to sound depressing, but my weekend has ruined my whole entire week, pretty much. This weekend, I went to my cheer team's competition in Mahomet, Illinois. It was the Illinois High School Association's Cheerleading Sectional. If you placed 1st through 5th in your division, you advanced to the state competition. We had 18 people in our division. Before I go into detail, I had better inform you what exactly goes on at a cheer competition.

Okay, you probably don't know this, but teams get ready for competitions like this months in advance. You basically have to come up with a competition team, and then make up a rountine, consistingof jumps, tumbling, and mounts. You have to make sure it has difficulty, but everything you do has to be perfect. On competition day, you perform this routine in front of a panel of judges, who each judge you on a specific thing. The higher the score, the better.

Our cheerleaders have already competed in one competition, ICCA State, and placed for state, which is one week from now. We all knew that our cheerleaders were going to make it to state for this competition, no problem. When they performed in front of the judges at IHSA this last Saturday, their rountine went okay. Some mounts didn't stink, so tumbling didn't stick, and it wasn't completely syncronized. Overall, the routine wasn't great, but not really bad. They performed 4th, so they had to watch all of the rest of the team's perform until we got the results.

Finally, results came. When they announced the top five teams that were going to be advancing to state the following weekend in a two day competition, we were shocked. Our name wasn't called. Nobody nkew what went wrong. We all figured we must have gotten either 6th or 7th, or at the very least, 8th place. We all were bummed out, and it only got worse. We then found out that we had gotten 12th place.

We all knew that we didin't deserve that at all. What got us that is that we were towards the front of the line up. You never want to be one ofthe first teams to go one the mat. You always want to be fresh in the judges eyes, and obviously if you weren't the last teams to go, they wont remember you as well. In fact, the team that went dead last won our division. That shows you how important it is to be towards the end of the lineup.

The whole compeititon wasn't bad though. Two people on our squad got scholarships for college cheerleading! There were scouts there from different collges and the gave a scholarship to them if they would like to use it at their college.

All of them know what they need to change to become better for our next competiton, which is next weekend. I know they will all do a great job. Good luck to them next week!

I will blog again next week. Bye!

Sincerely,

Me <3