Regional Cheer Competition

We are back from a very fun but absolutely exhausting cheer weekend.  You may remember that Meg's squad won their district competition in October, allowing them to compete in the Pop Warner Southeast Conference Regional Cheer Competition in Orlando.  All Junior Midget squads (12-14 year olds) performed yesterday. The competition started at 8:00 AM with a different squad brought out ever 4 minutes....for 5 hours.   (Yes, five hours.)  Our girls performed at 9:04.

The district cheer squads are placed into divisions based on team size (small, medium and large) as well as skill level (Level 1-4 with 4 being advanced acrobatics and skills).   With 17 members, Meg's squad is classified as Medium with a Skill Level of 2.  As it turned out, they were in the most competitive division, with 16 teams total representing Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida.

We were all up at 5:30 AM to see the girls off but not without a group photo, of course.  (The two in jeans are teen coaches who help the two adult coaches with practices.)

The girls were shuttled off at 6:00 AM with most of the parents arriving at the arena by 8:00. Here is a link to yesterday's performance, courtesy of a competing team's mom mom who took the video on my IPhone while I snapped photos.

JBFC Regional Cheer Competition

Meg spends most of the routine in the back row, far right.  She is a back spot which means she is the person in the back spotting and catching the flyer when doing lifts and stunts.  At about the 2 minute mark or so she moves to the far left for the dance portion.

Only the top two squads for each division move on to Nationals.  With that slight fumble at the very end of their routine we knew deep down that they probably wouldn't advance.  (Throughout the day there were fumbles that took down entire squads making ours fairly minor but typically only flawless performances place in the top two.)  Later, however, when they set up for the awards and we saw that they had trophies for the top FIVE finishers we became hopeful that they would come home with something.

And look....a four state territory and our girls placed 5th overall in their division!!!!!  We are sooooo very proud of them!!!

Trophies are good.  :-)

And to make the weekend even sweeter, our Falcons football team WON their regional championship game, 38-8, and are off to Nationals!!!

GO FALCONS!!!!