To say Apalachee High School competition cheerleading coach Meridith Wages was pleased with her team’s debut Saturday might be an understatement.
The Cheer Cats hosted the Wildcat Invitational and also took the floor to put their new routine on display.
“Saturday was a huge success,” Wages said. “We had some of the top teams in the state at our competition, therefore, there were quite a few spectators.”
The middle school division began the event. The Lassiter Junior Trojans took the first place trophy.
With students involved in taking the ACT, the high school session began at 2 p.m.
“There were quite a few really strong teams performing,” Wages said.
Ola High School’s coed team took first place with Peachtree Ridge High School earning second. Mill Creek High School took first place in the Class AAAAAA division with Lambert in second.
Flowery Branch High School took first place in AAAAA’s division with Loganville High School following. There were fewer schools competing in in A, AA and AAA.
Mill Creek took first place in the junior varsity division.
“We were pleased to have so many people from the community there to support both Winder-Barrow High School coed and Apalachee High School coed teams,” Wages said. “Both teams performed well.”
In breaking down her team’s performance Wages said:
“We wanted to get a baseline score with the routine we performed. Our degree of difficulty was much lower than what we need to be contenders and we knew this going in, however, our focus was to hit a clean routine and earn execution points. We had a few mishaps with stunts and even a fluke fall in one of our stunt groups, but over all we were pleased with the team’s performance.
“Since Saturday, we have made some changes in order to work towards maxing out on the score sheet — we need to make it extremely clear in each part of our routine in order for judges to easily determine where we fall on the rubric. We want to make it easy for the officials to see what the kids are doing so we can max out scores. We also plan to clean up this week and decide to only perform what our kids can do really well. We are anxious to see how our changes are scored this weekend at Mill Creek and plan to compete against our scores each week from here on out. Our kids are determined. We have an awesome group of kids and want the best experiences possible for them.”
