Cheer and dance teams begin competitive season with strong showing against two area schools
Photo description: The dance team shows off their artistic and technical prowess.
Photo credit: Esther Molina (photo from previous competition)
Maddy Peters
Sports Editor
The Concordia cheer and dance teams started off their competitive season strong with a rout of their competitors in Seward on Saturday.
The dance team won their triangular against Hastings College (59.0) and College of Saint Mary (57.0) with a score of 82.0. The cheer team, meanwhile, won their dual against Hastings with a score of 83.05, just below their program record of 83.36.
The dance team competed during the halftime of the women’s basketball game with a squad of juniors Avery Lewis and Maddie Wittstruck, sophomores Elise O’Neill, Taylor Larsen and Ryleigh Flesner, and freshmen Kaylee Powell and Hanna Bitner.
Dance at Concordia has flourished since last season, where the team broke record after record and averaged 79.64 over 10 events. The technical and artistic skill of the Bulldog team allowed them to place themselves amongst the top of the competitive conference. The team placed sixth at the Great Plains Athletic Conference championships, but the scores at the top were all quite close, demonstrating the work the team has yet ahead of them.
The cheer team’s competition took place in the PE Building next to Walz following the women’s basketball game. Saint Mary did not have a cheer team to compete, so the competition was between the Bulldogs and Broncos.
Cheer had a bit of catch-up last season, as it usually scored nearly 10 points less than the dance team. It finished with an average score of 77.89 over nine events. However, it broke into the 80s multiple times and managed to match or even outshine the dance team at a few meets. The team finished third at the GPAC championships, so better scores are within grasp.
“We’ve been working really hard since August to get things going,” said dance Head Coach Mandi Maser. “[We] started working on the competition stuff on the dance side of things in late September, cheer side of things [in] early October, so it’s just been, you know, working really hard to get to this point to be starting the season. So we’re really super excited.”
The goal for the season is to keep the good parts of the competition and slowly push the needle forward. With such high scores being a common theme amongst the teams, the teams do not want to overstep their abilities and risk having to make drastic changes to the routine.
“Hopefully we maintain our score averages [and] stay in that relative same spot just because we know that we can,” said Maser. “Hopefully that competitive edge comes out of each of them to like, really make sure that they’re reaching past that. And it’s just gonna take a lot of practice and a lot of reps and a lot of confidence from the girls to be able to really move the needle a little bit further in those average scores.”
As for the future, the teams travel to Mequon, Wisconsin for the Concordia Invitational Tournament to support the basketball teams and to participate in the cheer and dance competition. Dance won their event by five points while cheer lost to Concordia Ann Arbor by 0.08 points.
“We hope that it’s a really good, successful CIT,” said Maser. “We hope that the travels are great. [It’s] always interesting to go to Wisconsin in January. It will be a fun environment – we always love the CIT environment. We’re looking forward to the cheer and dance side of things. We really would love to be able to like, cross that threshold and to take over on the cheer side of things and hope we bring back that trophy on the dance side.”
CIT will round up January events for cheer and dance, with their next events occurring in early February.
