This weekend was my first ever time competing on a Worlds Cheer team, it was far from perfect but I am so proud of my team.

He said

Last year we fully anticipated to be our last season with Competitive Cheer, but with a very successful end to the season, and the possibility of competing on a World’s Bid Team, the desire to hang up her Cheer uniform subsided and so began her next, last season of Competitive Cheer. After being placed on Legacy for all of two days, Emelia was asked if she wanted to try out for the Level 6, Non Tumble World’s bid team, Valiant. She leapt at the opportunity and has been working at building their bid since the start of summer this year.

The team has been through it’s fair share of adversity already this season with some very early on injuries, and people living the team. There has been a lot of rotation through the stunt groups and even Emelia has gone from being a fourth to being an occasional fourth and sometimes third, to now, been a third for the entire routine. And their routine has been through a ton of change as well as they sort through the early-on rotation of athletes what with all the change I have mentioned already. Suffice it to say that even three weeks ago Danielle and Emelia had serious doubts that they would land anting at completion.

The girls ground away and worked through the focus on sharpening and honing the routine right up to their last practice Wednesday. To say that Emelia was assuming the worst would happen at this competition, is an understatement – but then again that is pretty much how she goes into any competition as it’s her way. But, the good news is where weeks before when they couldn’t start and finish their routine without a fall or something that stopped it, in the last few practices there was a couple of times they were able to get through start to finish.

Fall Classic, the first of the year, is always a one-day affair and it gives the teams the opportune to get the first real presentation of their routine in front of judges out of the way. Truthfully every season Emelia’s teams have always gone in shaky and not quite ready. But as I have come to learn, I think that is the intent of this competition. It’s not so much about how well you perform, but more about putting it out there and getting ready for the season to come. And quite honestly of the performances I saw, it was true of a lot if the gyms their competing. Sure there were some teams there who hit the ground running for the season, but overall it was just good to get this one, done and dusted so to speak.

Valiant’s division saw them up against one other team and while we didn’t see their performance, a few others that did, said they were with the same sort of challenges that Valiant is trying to overcome. When it came to how Emelia’s team did, they managed to get through the whole routine without any major issue, it certainly wasn’t clean and gives them a lot of work to do. But, in the end they finished 2nd place and were apparently quite close in score to first. But, there is a lot that needs to happen to their routine before they next completion—most namely they need to get in a lot more Level 6 skills.

So, the team got to work on that in earnest, today at practice. They have a month until their next Comp, Cheer For the Cure in Oshawa. This will be back to a two-day competition and will feel lot more like the level and pace their use to performing at. I am curious to see with how much they were able to shore up in the last couple of weeks, what they can do with four weeks of focus.

She said

This week for Emelia was a low-key week during the day as she is on her reading week from school. She was busy every night between work and cheer training so she didn’t full relax this week. The weeks leading into this first competition have been rough. So far they have two teammates out with concussions and then to add salt into the wound one of their  teammates had to be replaced due to a knee injury. It was another shift in a season of constastant shifting. It has not been an easy one for sure. As John mentioned there has been a lot of shuffling on this team, Emelia alone has moved to every stunt group this season and even changed positions. Finally about a month ago they made one last adjustment to see if they could get their stunts to hit. Emelia was moved to third one of the stunt groups and finally things were clicking with her in the third position for both of the stunt groups she is in. Even with all the changes things were far from ready. Even up to 2 weeks ago the routine was a hot mess. Everyone was getting nervous.

As things were moving closer to the first competetion things were being changed to hope that the girls could hit a routine, things were finally looking better, far from perfect but better. By the week leading in things were starting to look a lot better and everyone was feeling as ready as they could be. The girls were ready to hit the floor and there was a bit of hopeful optimism that things would go well. Emelia was going in with a great attitude as we arrived, she found her friends and she was relaxed and ready to go. The girls hit the practice gym and then things were a bit sideways, one stunt group had a fall in the run through and someone got hit in the face. I think that less with the girls a bit but they seemed to shake things off and again with all the cheer smiles on their faces.

So they hit the floor, you could see they were nervous but excited. Things were far from perfect, all of Emelia’s stunts hit but a lot did not go up and what did go up was not clean. A fair bit of the stunts were not full executed and you could see the wind go out of the girls sails as the routine went on. I will say I am proud that Emelia kept her cheer face and enthusiasm until the end. It was far from what they hoped. A lot of stressed out faces as they left the floor. But as someone who has seen what these girls have overcome, how far they have pushed themselves I think that they should be proud. I think what most of them have to remember is that this is the first worlds team for most of this team, that alone puts on a whole other level of pressure on a team. Add in that 75% of this team is moving up 3 levels from last year, and two moved up even more than that. So for a team that has a flyer who has never done even close to this level of stunting these girls should be beyond proud of themselves.

Today they were back at the gym, the coaches went in with a positive attitude and they were right back at it. From the what we could see the coaches were at it right away ensuring that every stunt group was being elevated, they have to put out a level appropriate routine (this came from the judges feedback) and they worked on all the stunts and made some changes, edited coaching and by the time we left today all the stunt groups were working on elevated stunts and things were going pretty well. There are still 5 more practices before they hit the competition floor so there is time to work on all these adjustments and hope for a much better run at Cheer for the Cure!