By: Rose Cataldo

This weekend the Middleborough High School cheer team competed at our regional competition at Marshfield High School. We started our day off in the morning at 10:45 with a kind of quick but hard practice focusing on our stunts and what we needed to do in order to make it to states. After the practice was over and we felt good about what we were going to compete we started with hair and makeup. We ended up leaving the school  at 1:50 for the competition. Once we got there, the time went by fast and we had warm ups not to long after we had been there. Which means we meet up and change into skirts,sneakers and stretch before we go to actual warm ups. Once we get to an actual warm up we go to 3 places the first, you stretch again, go over motions and dance. Once we get to the second mat we tumble and once everyone feels good we jump. When we finally get to the third mat, we warm up our stunts for the penalty judge to are sure what we have in the stunts or the if the stunt is legal and is not going to give us a penalty. Once that time is up we wait in the back until its our time to perform. Once we are next we line up in the back of the mat until the call us to come on the mat. When we hit the mat last weekend our routine was going the best it has ever before, when we dropped our pyramid the week before at leagues we were trying for it to not happen again. When we got to the pyramid the side flyer Lani’s foot was not caught and her group came down. We had a great recovery working as a team to get the pyramid back up. The dance was off but we thought we were going to be ok.

   When we went to awards later in the day we knew we had to keep a smile on our face regardless of if we moved on to states or not. While they were calling Division 4 teams we were getting ready to see if we made it to states. As they said the teams in third place.. Foxborough in second place. Tri-County and in first place. Hanover we knew we did not qualify to make it to states. We were so upset but when we got on the bus to go over scores we realized our score was only 3 points off from advancing to states. When Mrs. Shelters concluded going over our scores, she mentioned that there were bids they give out to teams they see could make it to states but did not  have a qualifying score. None of us wanted to get our hopes up the next day we went on the website to realize they gave us a bid to states at Tantasqua Regional High School in Sturbridge Ma, And that is where the Middleboro High School Cheer team will be competing this weekend.