Schaumburg HS celebrates TeamDance championship

After a 12:30 a.m. arrival from Peoria on a couple of hours of sleep and plenty of cheers and tears along the way, the Schaumburg High School drill team pulled it together Monday morning to give their fellow students an encore performance of their state championship routines.

The flag team's Lyrical Flag routine, to “Color Blind” by Counting Crows, not only won the Lyrical first place, but flags grand champion overall, at Sunday's TeamDance Illinois competition in Peoria.

The school also won 1st place for poms, and 3rd place for Tall Flags.

Back home at Schaumburg High School, the teams proudly displayed the hardware they brought back to a packed gymnasium pep assembly Monday morning.

The Flag Corps was undefeated and heavy favorites heading to state. They didn't disappoint. The Tall Flags competition was extremely tight with the top three teams within .06 of a point of each other.

Schaumburg scored the highest artistic score for their Lyrical Flag performance, and received the highest cumulative score as well.

Four-year-members Jill Tegtmeyer and Maggie Schulz described the two-hour wait for the results Sunday as nerve wracking, with lots of crying and hugging after their final performance together.

When the category was called, the whole team held hands, put their heads down, and held their breath.

The happy bus ride home was spent texting, calling friends and family, and in Maggie Schulz's case, sleeping from the sheer exhaustion of the whole weekend.

And, oh yes, changing all their Facebook account statuses to “Grand Champion.”