After the football season, the cheerleaders, who lead the spectators from the ground, don’t stop practicing. “Cheerleading doesn’t have a slow season,” said Head Coach Morgan Wadlow, “it’s almost year-round.” Because of this, tryouts happen in spring so that practice can still go on during the summer.
Throughout the year, practice focuses on one of two things: “Our primary focus for spring and summer practice is to prepare for football season,” said Wadlow. “In the fall and the winter, all of our practice is pretty much focused on competition routines.”
There are two different types of cheerleading competitions. They are game day, where the cheerleaders do their cheers and are judged on how well they lead the crowd. “There’s limits on what skill you can do,” said Wadlow. The other competition is the traditional routine. A smaller group of cheerleaders does this competition, as the skills used are difficult. The score for this is determined by how difficult the skills used are.
“Starting about September, the focus is getting ready for competition. We spend a lot of time stunting, a lot of time running through our choreography, dance formations, and we do a lot of conditioning.” Cheerleaders have a lot of practices with about three or four every week.
The scoring works a lot like other sports. Wadlow said, “the way the scoring is now is fairly similar to gymnastics and… figure skating.” This is only for the traditional routine, however, as the game day routine is focused on the crowd-leading aspect of cheer. Additionally, for both of the competitions, there is a panel of judges. “It’s always the same panel of judges, so that they can make sure that the scoring is as consistent as possible,” said Wadlow. “There [are] set point ranges for difficulty of skills.”
Because of the way that cheerleading competitions are scored, even if a team fails one of their stunts, they are still able to win. Wadlow said, “At this competition we weren’t perfect. We dropped a couple of stunts in our routine, but our routine difficulty was high enough, and other parts of the execution were really good… So even though it wasn’t a perfect routine, we still won.”
On Jan 18 at a competition in Sweet Home, the JV cheerleading team did their best performance of the year, getting first place. This is consistent with their first-place wins at the two other competitions that they have been to. Wadlow said, “our JV team is doing really, really well. If they keep it up, you never know. They could go undefeated all year, which would be really awesome.” The Cheerleading team also got second place at nationals on Jan. 24 and 25. Also, on Jan. 18 in the coed gameday competition, the cheer team tied for second place out of four teams.
