Cheery Monday

It has taken me years to understand competitive cheerleading. It's not like cheering at a football game at all. It's a 3 minute non-stop action performance, set to music that is loud and fast, and that has specific segments. Each routine has a dance segment, a chant segment, tumbling and stunts. (Stunts are lifting or tossing people in the air and building pyramids) Teams are divided into groups by several criteria. First is the age of the competitors. There will be a range of ages on a squad and that sets the level at which they compete. Showteams are the littlest kids, then minis, youth, junior and senior. Then the size of the squad counts. Small, medium or large. And lastly, the skill level of the team. Level 1 is no tumbling and Level 5 is performing fulls and arabians. So although there were 400 teams at the competition, there might only be 4 or 5 squads competing against each other.

Scoring is based on several criteria. Things like the difficulty level, choreography, facials (they make faces at the judges, seriously) energy level, mistakes, etc. The biggest ways to lose points is to drop a stunt or touch-down in tumbling.

On each team there are positions each person has. Katie is a back-spot. She is the person in the back of a stunt group responsible for pushing the flyer up into position and supporting her there. Backspots are the tallest, strongest girls. Flyers are the brave souls who go up or get thrown in the air. They are usually tiny and flexible. Bases are the two girls that each hold a foot of the flyer. The have to work in unison to make everything work correctly. A front spot is the girl in front who also helps support the flyer and is there to catch her if she falls forward. Then everyone tumbles and dances, etc.

This is Katie as she lands at the end of a tumbling pass. Sorry the pictures are blurry. I was using my new camera and figuring out what I was doing. Plus, the Alamodome is huge and our seats were waaaay high.

Starting a tumbling pass...
heading into her roundoff to begin her series....
coming around to set for her back handsprings....and then the camera stopped. I was using the burst function, taking 2-3 frames a second. And it quit. Ugh. I wanted to get the whole series.
Here is one stunt, a pyramid. Notice the men lurking around the edges? They are there for safety. If someone falls they are right there to catch them, and they do an awesome job. Of course they get to look up girls skirts all day long, too. Not a bad job!

Another stunt. Katie is on the far left bottom. Just look for the extremely long legs. That's her.
This is another kind of stunt. They put the flyers up at full-extension (arms extended) and the flyers do all sorts of cool positions, including things on one leg that require extreme flexibility.
Sunday morning, rise and shine sleepy head. We have to be at ther dome by 7am. Doesn't matter that we didn't get to eat dinner until 10:30 pm.

Hey, is that your uniform on the floor? Why yes it is. Le sigh.....