The Four Corners Upper School cheer team flipped into the season at their first competition hosted by South Lake High School.
FCUS has two competitive cheer teams; Game Day, which focuses on chants and crowd interaction, and Traditional, which involves more dancing and stunting.
The Game Day team performed to the sound of “All of the lights” by Kanye West featuring Rhianna and “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes. The Traditional team danced to a remix of songs including, “We Found Love” by Rhianna and “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield among others. This is the first year some cheerleaders including senior Salome Guarin are on both teams and therefore had to learn both routines.
“Some experiences I have doing traditional and competition the same day is having to put all into it with a lot of responsibility and energy. I also experience having to cope with a lot of frustration, but at the end of the day one of the most amazing experiences is basically having this amazing team where I’ve met a lot of friends, and I do everything I do, not just for myself, but for the team,” Restrepo Guarin said.
The first competition of the season usually sets the standard for the coming competitions, being a place for the team to grow and improve. Sophomore Marcella Perez-Ortiz has been a varsity cheerleader since eighth grade. Perez-Ortiz shared her insight on the season ahead.
“I am really confident with our team; this year’s cheerleaders have proven especially talented. Where we are right now is a vast improvement from where we’ve begun in past years, and I just have a really good feeling about this year’s season and with the girls on the team as well. This is just the start of the season, and I don’t think it’s the best that we can do, but definitely, the best that we can do with the amount of time we had, we’re just getting started, this is just our warm-up,” Perez-Ortiz said.
Freshman Kailey Fendone who is a cheerleader on the Game Day team, has always enjoyed the sport’s dancing aspect. This year the team’s dance is her favorite part of the routine.
“My favorite part would probably be the ending dance. I feel like the dance would be during first, so it is a lot cleaner, which makes it more fun to do when you know what you are doing, but also there is a lot of movement, which I like looking at, and I also like doing physically,” Fendone said.
Behind the scenes, Coach Shannon Marino is tasked with rehearsing the girls and building them up movement by movement, an important and often forgotten job.
“I am very confident in them, they practiced consistently four days a week, so we have a lot of time to work on everything that we’re doing, so there’s nothing we give them that they’re not capable of doing, so that way they also go out onto the floor being confident as well,” Marino said.
Last Wednesday, November 20th , the cheerleading teams both took to the mat and performed their first routines of the season. The Traditional team placed second in their category and the Game Day team took home the win in their category.
“I think we did really good yesterday, we hit zero, which some people don’t know what that means, which it just means that you hit the whole routine, and we hit every stunt, we did really good, we had a lot of facials. Game Day we got first place and Traditional team got second place,” Murphy said.
Their first competition is now history, and for senior Isabella Hemenway a special memory since this is her very last cheerleading season before she graduates.
“This time it felt a little more different than previous years, it was my last time ever competing at South Lake, so the nerves definitely took over. The only thing I could think about was how we all knew exactly what to do and had the potential of winning if we all worked together and that’s exactly what happened,” Hemenway said.
