State cheerleading finals down to one day
The Illinois cheerleading championships are down to one day -- and everything will ride on one performance only.
Alarmed by the weather and the travel conditions, the Illinois High School Association has canceled today's preliminary cheerleading finals. The contest is taking place at U.S. Cellular Coliseum in downstate Bloomington.
Instead, the cheerleading cham-pionships will come down to one day -- and one performance -- for each of the 100 squads, all to be held Saturday.
They will follow the original preliminary schedule from today, according to the IHSA Web site.
With the competition now reduced to one day, no finals will take place. Instead, awards will be given based on Saturday's preliminary results only.
Awards ceremonies will take place at the end of Saturday morning's session for small and medium schools and at the end of the evening session for large schools and coed teams.
Tickets are $10 for the Saturday session. The small and medium school competition will start at 8:30 a.m.
Large and coed teams will start competing at 3:30 p.m.
"For some of the teams that would have left today, we felt it would have been too dangerous," said John Martin, a member of the IHSA cheerleading advisory com-mittee, and Barrington High School athletic director.
"This way, all the teams that qualified (for state) are still in a position to win," Martin added.
Of IHSA sanctioned sports, only gymnastics and competitive cheerleading operate under a preliminary and finals format. In cheerleading that means the top 10 squads from the four divisions -- small, medium, large and co-ed -- advance to the finals.
In this revised format, teams have only one shot at it, and a 3ˆ¨-minute shot, at that.
"It's sort of an advantage," Martin theorizes. "With the preliminaries and the finals, everyone has seen the competition by the time they get to the finals. This way, everybody's got the same shot. It sort of levels the playing field."
Coaches contacted in Bloom-ington, had mixed reactions.
"It totally changes everything," said Jeff Siegal, coach of the two-time defending champion Elk Grove High School coed cheer-leading team.
"Whereas we would have had a chance to look at our scores after prelims, and see where we ranked, now we have just one shot.
"And since we're the first team to out there," Siegal added, "we have to hope that our score holds up."
Stevenson High School's squad is in search of their first state title, after more than 20 years of quali-fying (for both the IHSA and Illi-nois Cheerleading Coaches' Asso-ciation competitions).
With Friday suddenly open, they used the time to work out in a rented banquet space.
"We're trying to stay focused and not get too distracted by all of this," said Coach Jill Freitag. "Cabin fever is the biggest thing I'm battling right now."
All of which makes Saturday's competition as tight as ever, with a huge, screaming crowd expected. U.S. Cellular Coliseum seats 6,000, and last year's event sold 10,000 tickets for both days of action.
Officials with the Blooming-ton-Normal Area Convention & Visitors Bureau see it as a boon as well. They were expecting as many as 7,000 visitors to the area for the state competition, and pumping as much as $750,000 to the local economy.