UCA National High School Cheerleading Competition
to my team and said, “Just have fun out there. Forget about competing and do what you love to do. We made it this far, and that is more than most teams their first year here!” With fire being our team word we all huddled and on three yelled fire. We fired-up on the mat and waited for our music to begin. Again there was nothing but fun and excitement from the moment the music began to the moment we were off the mat. My team went out there and had fun. We had another one of our best performances ever. We got off the mat and went to wait for the results to see how we did. This time we did not have to wait long. The announcer began the results and the 4th team he called off was Romeo. We all jumped up and started hugging each other. We were so happy. Our first year to UCA and we make it to finals. That is an accomplishment all in itself.
The next day we were all still so excited about making it to finals that we did not even want to go to Magic Kingdom. All we wanted to do is to go back to the WWS arena and compete for the National Championship title. Our team, Eisenhower, Salem and Swartz Creek all went to The Magic Kingdom together. That was a lot of fun. To have a bunch of people from Michigan with us was refreshing. The four teams hung out all day together. We also went to dinner together at Planet Hollywood. After dinner, it was back to the hotel to get ready for the next day of competition. Getting ready meant washing and ironing uniforms, cutting and starching new bows, and putting curlers in our hair.
The next morning we all woke up at 9am to get ready for the day ahead. Us, 16 girls all had to get our curlers taken out of our hair, and our make up done. All Brian, our one and only boy, had to do was get dressed. We left for the arena about 11am. Finals for small and large co-ed started at 12am. When we got there we barely had any time to warm-up. Our team was the 4th team to go in finals. The whole team was very nervous. Right before we went on the mat the team was freaking out. We were just told that the competition was going to have a live feed to ESPN and we were going to be on TV. The thought of that scared everyone. When we stepped onto the mat you could tell we were all very frightened. That finals routine was almost the worst routine we have ever done. There were many errors.
The award ceremony came and the whole team thought that we were not going to place at all. We were disappointed in our performance but happy that we made it to finals. The announcer started with 15th place it was [next page]