By Hunter Litke & Kenadee Torres
The Charger
Midland HS
1st Place
Division 1, Yearbook
Sports Reporting
Summer ended quickly for the pommers as they traded in their bikinis and the sun’s blaze for tennis shoes and long preparations days.
“We usually start High Kick in September,” senior captain JoAnna Danielsen said. “[Starting early] helped us prepare more with the routine and get stronger for it before competition even started.”
Typically pompon teams attend camp in August, but camp was a month earlier due to choosing a earlier camp date than prior years allowing the teams the chance for more training toward their High Kick routines. Compared to other years, varsity comprised of 10 seniors to eight underclassmen.
“Being a varsity team for multiple years obviously helps with the preparation for conditioning and also being able to contain yourself while you’re out there on the floor,” Danielsen said. “It’s really important people that are experienced stay on the team because it’s a great way to improve our standings overall.”
For the High Kick competitions, both ]V and varsity teams chose a theme or an idea and then correlated it to different music types and choreography. The teams tossed ideas together voting upon the one that best suited them for that year. The JV team decided on their theme together agreeing on the theme of ‘Starbucks baristas’. The chosen theme for the varsity team was ‘H.H. Dow Family Reunion’.
“The theme for High Kick is a family reunion so we’re playing a grandparents song and the grandparents will come out and do their thing to Frank Sinatra or something like an older song,” senior Elizabeth Wegner said. “We’ll be dancing to Ariana Grande like the kids will be doing that, it’s basically a big joke. It’s supposed to be an acting theme more than a high kick theme. It’s like porn and theater mixed together.”
The final scores of of the High Kick competition on Nov. 6 illustrate the team’s efforts. Varsity walked away with a third place win and JV came in sixth place.