Taking Home the Gold

This past weekend my cheer team had a competition in New Orleans, Louisiana. This competition was our second chance at getting a bid to a very prestigious competition at the end of the season. At the last competition with a bid we had some major issues during our second performance that caused us to get 2nd place. A couple weeks before that competition we had another competition with bid opportunities where we put on very impressive performances both days and walked away again without a bid. This meant that this weekend in New Orleans was very important for us and we had a lot of motivation to put on the performance of a lifetime. On Saturday we had a very good performance but not the best we had done. A couple hours after our performance we heard from eh judges that they called one of our skills "illegal" and giving us a penally in our scores. This was a skill that no other judges earlier in our season has called "illegal." We thought that this meant our chances for a bid were completely gone but found out later that evening we had actually scored so high that the deduction did not knock us out of 1st place going into day 2. On Sunday we all came in very nervous as last time we had gone into day 2 in 1st place we messed up and got bumped into 2nd. However, we all decided it was time to come together and make sure we stayed focused on our goal no matter what everyone around us was saying. We took the stage and did executed everything exactly how it was supposed to be. We made our coaches and parents cry from how proud they were. Walking away from the performance I felt like I had learned a lot about perseverance and working together with a team. In terms of learning outcome 4 my team stayed committed to the job we had of doing our best and perserviered even when the judges had made an unfair call. In terms of learning outcome 5 my team realized how important it was to work together and trust everyone on the team to do their own individual job. At the end of the day my team was able to grow and learn together from the weekend and I could not be more proud.
(We will find out about the bid to the competition tonight at 7:30pm.)