It would be OCF if I didn’t have a cold! But we got silver so there’s that.
He said
Hard to believe it but with the OCF Provincial Championship from this weekend out of the way, we are now down to the last two competitions of the season for Emelia. We have Canadian All-Star Nationals April 11 & 12th and then the big one in the IASF Worlds in Florida April 24 to 27th, and then the season is pretty much done with the exception of the year-end Showcase that CheerStrike puts on for friends and families. A lot of time and effort will go into these last two events as they are the events that the season was built to. But, as the season wraps up we will see how serious Emelia was about this being her real, last season. There was some conversation to the contrary this past weekend.
This week was the Provincial Championship hosted by Ontario Cheer Federation and going into it, we knew the girls would medal as there was only one other team up against them in their Open Level 6 Non Tumble Worlds category. The team they were up against, were of the same skill as Valiant—their raw score was relatively close to them—so it would all come down to who could execute better over the two days. Valiant’s day one routine was good but not their best, so they ended up behind just by 4 points. So, it all came down to day two. As their luck has been this year they did not execute a perfect routine on day two and with a stunt coming down the girls knew their fate was sealed. They ended up bring up the silver, but definitely were disappointed with how it went. There is a full month off before Nationals so it will be how they refine and focus in that time to build the right momentum to Worlds.
This week, we had a sudden and welcome big change in the weather with temps getting into double digits and even high teens some days. A lot of the snow is gone, and even better is I have been able to get back outside for bike rides. It’s very hard to measure or explain just how much better it feels to ride when it’s outside in the fresh air and sun. Not every day this week was all sunshine and blue skies—there were a couple of days where I doubted my decision with it being cooler and raining, but in the end I was more happy about spending more days this week outside than on the trainer in the bike room upstairs. Happy to say that 4 of 7 rides were outdoors last week and the forecast looks like more of the same for this week too!
She said
To say this cheer season has flown by would be an understatement. A friend of mine through cheer and I were chatting this morning and said this felt like the fastest season. It might have been because this season was busier than normal. It might be because this is likely Emelia’s last season. Or… it just might be that life goes by in a blink of an eye when you wish it would slow down. This past weekend was OCF, the one competition that Emelia seems to be sick at every single year, and this year was no different. Now in the scale of OCF illnesses this one seemed to be the least impactful for her but still she gets sick every year at this point in the competition season. This competition for Emelia and her team was not a high stress one, this was the last bid competition of the season for most gyms hoping to get a bid to Worlds but with Emelia’s team having that secured long ago the girls were going in without a ton of pressure. And I will say thankfully so, the last few weeks in practice have been down right rough. Nothing seem to be going right, if the girls had the pressure to hit zero both days to secure a bid I am not sure how relaxed any of the would have been. So they went into this weekend pretty relaxed.
The week leading in to competition was another busy one for Emelia. She was back in the grind of classes, she finally got all her grades back from her midterms before reading week and all in all is very proud of how she did. She is now back in the grind with papers and presentations due this coming week so she isn’t getting much rest or a break. She is still managing to balance all her commitments pretty well including a few late nights with her girls living their best life. It allowed Emelia to keep loose going into this past weekend and not to be overly stressed.
Before we knew it we were at Friday and needing to head down to Brampton. It seems that three day competitions love to have Friday/Saturday completion times for the World’s teams, it’s not easy as this means Emelia misses school and John and I need to balance work but having a Sunday to recover, with no training for Emelia gives us all time to recover. Now back to the actual competition. We made our way down to the hotel and Emelia got herself ready before needing to meet up with the coaches and her teammates. The girls were all in great spirits and ready to hit the floor and do their best. Things started our clean and then one of the stunts went down, I will say the girls recovered really well and put on their cheer faces and energy and finished strong. After day one they were 4 pts behind the lead team. Emelia felt good about that as their deductions were more than 4 points so if they had a clean run day two they could make it interesting to take first place. In the end day two was not clean and the girls came home with silver. The good thing for the team now is that Nationals is almost a month away, they can focus on what they need to upgrade, what they need to clean up because they want to end their season in Canada with their best performance before heading to Florida!