High Expectations From Disappointed Cheerleaders

November 18, 2019, I started my senior year of competition cheering. I have been cheering for twelve years and this is my last season ever of cheering. It started out really well we had some new people join and we had some people that have done cheering before. During the beginning of the season, we started out with nine people on the cheering squad. We had the choreographer come and teach us some of the stunts for our routine. She also taught us a few eight counts of the dance. We learned this with ease. After the choreographer left we ended up having another new person start as well. We had to teach the parts of the routine that we had learned. We taught her and she was doing great. We also taught some of the cheers that we had to do at basketball games. After the two practices, the new girl quit the cheering squad. We kept progressing and we got better. The choreographer came back to teach us more.

After she had come back for the second time another person quit from the cheering quad. The cheering squad was a little upset because we had worked hard to figure out the routine and now we had to rework it. We did so with ease so we were pretty happy. We kept practicing and we were doing a great job.

This is where things went downhill. When we were practicing the opening of our routine, we realized that the person that had been helping to catch the flyer kept getting hurt. We had to switch things up again. The other cheerleader that was trying to catch and I had to switch spots in order for me to be able to help catch the girl that was flying. The stunt ended up working better when I was catching and she was backing. After we switched we had to learn each other’s parts. We had not practiced one of the small three-person stunts that had to happen in the opening. We tried it and the person that we had to put up ended up getting hurt. She could not perform at MVCs that Saturday so we had to cancel going to it.

With this latest injury, we got behind in learning the rest of the routine and we had to get back on track. We ended up practicing even more and even harder. We came up with new moves for the beginning and we had to change spots around. After that, we were doing a little better. Then we had to change people that were flying in the stunts and we had to change the stunts. Then we had someone with a hurt back and they could not do stunts. So we had to change them again. We did all of these two weeks before Regionals which is a big competition where they would choose who goes to states. We finally fixed our routine so we could hit it. We were feeling really good about our routine and the hard work that went into it.

We were hitting the routine really good for a while and people started to get tired of practicing the routine multiple times in a row. We would all get tired and we would complain to our coach. Eventually, our coach got upset with us because people had stopped trying to hit the routine. When our coach got upset with us, this made the entire team resent each other. We could not stand to be around each other for more than 20 minutes. We kept bantering back and forth with each other. We were having team meetings on how to become a better team, but that was only a temporary fix, by this I mean during that practice. There were eight strong personalities on the team and each of us with our own ideas. This caused controversy within the squad. There were times when I honestly did not know if we were going to be able to get everyone on the same page to be able to compete at regionals.

We persevered, started listening and talking to each other and the Coach. We really wanted this routine to hit and wanted to make it to States. We were certain we were going to make it to States. The routine was looked great and we were hitting the stunts without falling or being unstable. We expected to get a bid to States. There were only ten teams and we expected to come in either fourth or fifth place. That would ensure a bid to States.

On January 25, 2020, we performed our routine at the Augusta Civic Center. Our routine was performed with very few flaws. Everyone including spectators, coaches from other teams and some of the officials thought our routine was great. The cheering squads from other schools dropped their stunts and were not clean; meaning tight motions, facials, and transitions. We waited eagerly with confidence for the results from the judges. We truly expected a bid to States. The results came in, unexpectedly and to our disappointment, we did not make it to states. After Regionals the squad was so disappointed that we had to take a few practices off because we were not able to hit everything. We then went to another competition and we got first place. This means that we definitely should have gotten a bid to States.

When expecting one thing and having it completely turn around and end unexpectedly can be extremely disappointing. When Oedipus expected that the murderer of King Laius was someone else. When he kept accusing people of being the murderer he did not realize who the real murderer was. It was Oedipus himself that had murdered the king and he was extremely taken aback by what he had found out about himself.

Photo by NHN_2009 on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA