PCM Cheer had their first competitions at Carlisle and University of Dubuque the weekend of the 21. They placed first at both of their competitions. Cheer is a very difficult and dangerous sport. When flying or basing you could get severely hurt. Cheer is also very time consuming, the PCM cheerleaders have been practicing since June. They work very hard to be able to compete and even take home first place. Senior Tiffani Koonce who is a flyer on the team talked a bit about cheer competitions. 

¨What we do when we get there is we finish getting ready we usually are ready by the time we get there then we put lipstick on and finish whatever we need to do then we will go into where the area is and just watch other teams until it is our time to go check in to go stretch and use the extra mats we will practice on the practice mats and get what we need to get done with for about 30 minutes and then they will call us up and we will wait for our time to go and we will preform and we will do our thing,¨ Tiffani said, ¨then we will get done with the routine and we will just talk to our coaches about how it went if it went good or bad and then we will do what we want to do, stay in uniform until awards. Awards we all are on the mat then the announcer will have lib contests where you can bring out one group from each team and you have a lib contest to see who can do a lib the longest which if you don’t know what a lib is it is where you are standing on one leg and your other leg in passé and then we have jump contests and we have tumbling contest and we just do a bunch of fun stuff before the awards.¨ 

The way the scoring works for cheer is different from other sports. There are three judges and each judge has a different thing they are scoring they each watch different things so one is watching stunts and motions and another judge is watching jumps, dancing and formations then the last judge watches the performance and energy levels. Then they will score the teams out of like five and it depends sometimes. They have to have clean movements and good stunts and just work together to get more points. As a flyer Tiffani said ¨the most difficult thing about flying is mental because you are in the air and it is very easy to feel like what if one of my bases don’t catch me but they will, but the most important thing about being a flyer is staying tight in everything your doing and you have to be confident in what your doing.¨ 

The PCM cheer team has just started doing competitions after a break ¨when I was a freshman in 2020 we were coming back from covid year and there were different divisions like stunt groups, co-ed, cheer dance and game night.¨ Tiffani said, ¨for my freshman year it was on video and so we had to come up with our routine and we were in a different division then we are now, game night and we record it and we sent it in then they would show it on tv and we would get our placing on tv and we would watch it as a group so it has been like three years since we did something state related.¨ The PCM cheer team has been working so hard this season and it really shows in how they perform. They stand out from other teams in many ways but according to Tiffani ¨I think what makes us different is how much we have gone through we are so strong as a team and we are just always trying to do what’s right.̈ Tiffani said, ¨We have worked so hard like I have never worked this hard in cheer until this year and we are so close to each other and we want to help each other otherwise I think we have the energy and we just want to show what we have worked so hard for.¨  Keep it up girls, good luck at state!