Concordia Dance and Cheer Crush Their Competitions
Madeline Peters
Sower Staff
The Concordia dance and cheer teams faced off in a triangular against the Hastings College Broncos and the Mount Marty University Lancers Wednesday night. Dance won their event 83.1-73.3-39.4 and cheer won their duel against Hastings 74.25-69.2. Mount Marty cheer was supposed to come as well, but was unfortunately not able to compete, so the cheer triangular was switched to a duel.
The dance team performed first for the night during the women’s basketball game halftime. The dance team set program high scores two weeks in a row this season. The team did not set another record this week, but their score continues the strong season that the Bulldogs have worked for.
Head coach Mandi Maser was excited for the team’s performance, but acknowledged the work that needed to be done saying, “The girls came out and they were really strong, did a great job. Couple of things kind of tripped us up on some of our more technical skills that we’ll of course constantly continue to work on, and so it always gives us something to strive for.”
The cheer team meanwhile had their second competition of their season. Performance-wise, they improved from the past week. Their routine was more solid and tricks that they struggled with last week were done better. While their score is three points less than last week, overall they performed their tricks more confidently.
Maser was proud of the adaptability of the team saying, “They made some big improvements from last week. They only had a couple of practices to get a couple of our other kids that had gone through some injuries back on the mat. They did really well, they worked really hard to be able to make some things happen.”
Both teams will perform as part of the Concordia Invitational Tournament in their competitions Saturday Jan. 28 starting at 9 a.m. for dance and 9:45 a.m. for cheer. Maser hopes that the teams will ultimately find joy through the long weekend ahead of them, “I hope that the kids get to really experience what CIT is all about because it’s not just about the basketball tournament, just about cheer and dance, just about the athletic side of things. CIT is really something that’s special that these kids have not gotten to experience.”
Maser continued, “It’s something where they can be competing head-to-head and be really a bunch of rivals going back and forth for two days and when it comes down to it, gathering together to really understand what is the most important thing is that everybody was brought together for a purpose and we get to live that way each day and we get to become better not just as athletes, but as people and work together to strive for those goals.”
