First Competition for Highlights

This past weekend was the first performance for my special needs cheer team, Highlights. I am one of 4 assistant coaches for this team of 20 athletes. This performance was at a competition in which many of the other cheer teams from my gym were going to compete. Due to the schedule put out by the competition the head coach for Highlights as well as 2 of the helpers were going to be competing during the time that Highlights had to warm-up. The only other assistant coach is a 5th grader who had just started helping this team a few months ago. Knowing that I have been with this team since 8th grade the head coach asked me to step up and take over everything for the day. I had to lead stretches, warm-ups, and prepare them to take the performance stage. This made me really use learning outcome 1 because I had to take leadership in this situation and now I feel a lot more confident in my abilities to take on a challenge like this in the future. In addition, I feel that I used learning outcome 2 because I had to face this challenge head on and develop my organization skills because if I had not stayed calm and organized the athletes would have became very stressed and most likely not been able to take the stage at the time they needed to. In the end everything worked out and the day was very successful. My coach was very thankful for me and said he has a new found respect for me and he feels confident he can trust me to do these kinds of things again in the future.