On Tuesday, Holy Family Cheerleading headed up to Longmont High School to face two other teams in 4A Traditional All Girl division in the Northern Colorado Athletic Conference.
Our team had lots to live up to coming off of a CHSSA State Runner Up season. We debuted our routine on October 22nd at The Empire Athletics Showcase at Monarch High School. We went out and hit a clean routine with small timing issues. The judges loved our routine but had small and fixable critiques, which fueled our desire to get back into the gym and upgrade. We had a week to clean up and add difficulty for our next competition Boo Bash. Adding things like singled legged stunts and inversion skills to extension would up our difficulty and routine composition.
Up at Roosevelt High School, we competed at Boo Bash against Frederick High School and Discovery Canyon. Holy Family Cheer put out a decent zero deduction routine but had some weak points. We finished second place to a clean Discovery Canyon routine, which had team tumbling and more solid hitting stunts. Our singled legged stunts were not solid and our overall performance score was lower. Our voices in the cheer dipped when we transitioned to our stunts, which is a common weakness we have as a team. We were bummed, but it wasn’t our best. The second place finish lit the fire and motivated us to get to work for Leagues.
Our focus going into Leagues was to achieve “that feeling”. Our past two performances were OK, but not up to our standard, and we did not want to walk off the mat at Leagues feeling defeated. The week of practice leading up to Leagues was filled with upgrades, solidifying our single legged stunts, nailing our tumbling, jump timing, and cleaning up our dance.
After a tough week of practice, we arrived at Longmont High School ready to leave it all on the mat and become back to back League champions. Our warm up was near perfect, with a little stunt mistake on our last warm up mat. We walked out of the warm up room feeling confident, leaving the nervous energy backstage. As we waited to get called out to the mat, the vibe of the team was calm, but ready to do their job. We got called out, set our props, and set for our routine.
I remind my team always to take everything one step at a time, because thinking of a whole routine at once is overwhelming as opposed to thinking of one skill at a time. When we got to our elite stunt, things got a little shaky but we recovered and moved onto the next skill. We finished our elite stunt and transitioned to our cheer, keeping it in mind that we need to make up for the mistakes made in the first music section. Our cheer was one of the best we had performed so far this season (and what had won us the competition). After our cheer had ended, we transitioned to our dance and pyramid section. The dance was slightly rushed, considering our nerves about the upcoming pyramid which we had only hit so many times leading up to Leagues. We made it to pyramid and our inversion skill to extension did not catch fully extended, making our next skill, a ball up to extension, a little shaky. The last and final skill, a switch up to lib, did not go into the air. We pushed up a final structure at prep, embarrassed of what we just put out.
With some tears, bad attitudes and heads down, we waited for awards thinking that we lost our chance of being back to back League champions.
But, our loud, crowd engaging energy was enough to put us on top despite our monstrosity of a pyramid. By the grace of God, Holy Family Cheer managed to pull out a win. Compared to the two other teams, our difficulty, execution, cheer and timing was just better. Our coach reminded us that it will not always be like this. We cannot expect to win with a mediocre routine and that we have to strive to hit everything that we put out on the mat.
The Holy Family Cheerleaders will be competing in less than a month at CHSSA State on December 8th.
