Silver lining: ECC ends season as 2A Large Varsity runner-up
The 2021-2022 competition cheerleading season may not have started out the way the Elk County Catholic High School competition cheerleading squad hoped, but on Saturday afternoon it ended with the squad finishing as the runner-up in the 2A Large Varsity division at the PIAA Competitive Spirit Championships in Hershey.
“Our very first competition, we did not do great. Our routine was not the way we wanted it to be. We did not place great. It was a tough way to start the season, especially when we knew last year we got third in the state,” said ECC head coach Franchesca Herzing.
The team’s second competition of the year went better, but they still were not happy with their overall result.
“I think it would have been really easy for the girls to kind of just give up and say, ‘This just isn’t our year. We’re not in it this year.’ But they didn’t. They came back and kept working, and by our third competition we really hit and had a great routine,” Herzing said. “Obviously, we did really well at districts. We had the highest score of the day, and they just kept that momentum coming and building up. That was a big mental thing. It was something we talked a lot about as a team, so that was something that we were really proud of.”
Herzing also shared that the team saw the value of putting in work, even when there was not immediate gratification. As an example, she cited the skills they continuously worked on for their pyramid.
“We made some final changes right before states to do probably one of the coolest pyramids we’ve ever done, and part of that is a skill where the flyers, the top girls, are in a handstand in the air and then they pop up to be standing on their feet,” Herzing said. “That is one of the first skills we started working on in our pyramid early in the year. It just wasn’t there yet, and it wasn’t there yet, so we put in an easier skill that they could hit. We practiced that for a little bit and then we’d come back and work on the handstand, and it just wasn’t there yet and wasn’t there yet. But they never said, ‘We’re tired of this.’ They would immediately be like, ‘Okay, we hit the part that’s in our pyramid now. Can we work on the handstand? Can we work on the harder skill?’ We didn’t get to put that in until January, but I think that just says a lot about them that they wanted to keep coming back to that until they finally got it right.”
After winning the District 9 Large Varsity title earlier this month, the ECC squad entered the state competition as one of 14 teams vying for the state title in the 2A Large Varsity division. Herzing noted that they did make some changes to their routine between the two competitions.
“We made a few tweaks to our routine between districts and states,” Herzing said. “The skills in our partner stunt sequence remained the same as at districts, but we were able to add a sixth group as we had our full team back from illness and injury. We made quite a few changes in our pyramid too. We have been working on some more difficult skills all season but wanted to wait until we had them perfected to add them to the routine. The weeks between districts and states (at Johnsonburg and at home in exhibition), we added some of the new elements and finally put the final touches on for our state performances.”
One of the elements of the routine that Herzing was most proud of was that all 24 members of the squad were used in every section of it.
“That is something that we’re really proud of because it’s unusual for most teams, and it really is unusual for us,” Herzing said. “We normally end up with an extra girl standing behind a partner stunt, or, in the past, we almost always ended up pulling some kids off the mat once we got to districts or states. This year, we didn’t do that, and we were still able to have a good level of difficulty in our skills. That’s something we’re really proud of this year.”
Of the 14 teams in Friday’s preliminary round, the squad placing in the top 25 percent advanced directly to the finals and the teams in the next 25 percent advanced to the semifinals to compete for a final advancement spot to the finals. The remaining teams were eliminated.
ECC was one of our squads to score high enough to advance directly to the finals. The squad posted the third best score of the day with 84.6667 following a 2-point deduction. Laurel High School earned the top score with 85.2, Archbishop Ryan High School was second with 85.1667, and Warren High
School claimed the final spot with a score of 81.85.
The four teams that advanced to the semifinals were eventual state champion Neshannock with a score of 81.4, Forest Hills with a score of 75.0667, Montoursville Area with a score of 74.1667, and Johnsonburg with a score of 73.9667.
“We were really pleased with the team’s performance during prelims,” Herzing said. “Our cheer had a ton of energy, and the team was able to hit all of the new pyramid skills, which was really exciting. We had one minor stunt fall and a few timing issues in the partner stunts. While we were happy, we knew we had the opportunity to make improvements and do better during the finals. The girls say making it straight through to finals was ‘exciting,’ ‘surreal,’ and ‘a relief!’ It was one of our biggest goals of the season to make it to finals, but we knew our division was going to be competitive and figured the scores would be close.”
Following their performance on Friday, the team elected to not make any additional changes.
“We had one additional pyramid upgrade we did not perform either day,” Herzing said. “We weren’t 100 percent confident in it and knew it was more important to us to be clean and solid.”
Neshannock ended up emerging from the four-team semifinal with a score of 82.75 to round out the five-team field for the finals.
Herzing explained that the teams in a division are all brought out onto the mat for the announcement of the final results.
“They bring you all out on the mat and sit like in a horseshoe style, and then the announcer comes out and they go from the bottom up, so fifth place up. Once they announced third place and we still hadn’t been called, we were like, ‘Oh my gosh! Okay, so we’re in the medals!’ That was our longshot goal – to get a medal,” Herzing said.
Herzing shared that she told the team on Monday at practice that she thought they had an outside chance at being able to medal at the competition.
“I told them there was maybe a five-to10-percent chance that we could get a medal, and they did that,” Herzing said. “They keep proving us wrong. There are so many skills this year that we were just like, ‘We would love to do this. We would love to see you hit this, but I just don’t know if you can do it.’ And they worked their butts off and they hit it. We told them, ‘These are the teams that we expect to be there. These are the teams that we think can beat us. These are the teams we think we can beat. These are the teams we think it’ll be really close with, so we have to go out there and do what we can do, do the best at everything we know how to do, and focus on us. Everything that they’re doing is outside of our control. We put the work in. We’re 100 percent confident in everything that is in our routine, so just go out there and do it how you know how to do it.’ That’s exactly what they did.”
When the final results were announced, ECC ended up second by 0.2667. Neshannock won the state title with a final score of 84.9 and ECC had a final score of 84.6333. Neither team had any deductions.
“That was another focus,” Herzing said. “We are very realistic about our abilities and our routine. We know where our weaknesses are. We know that our partner stunts do not have the difficulty that some teams do. We are maxing out at what we can do and do clean and solid. We know our tumbling is a weak spot for our team, so we kept saying, ‘We have to be clean. We have to be solid.’ To go out in finals where there’s so much pressure and no room for mistakes, you can’t ask for much more.”
Adding to the challenge is the fact that the performance of each individual on the mat impacts the team’s final score. For ECC, that meant all 24 members of the squad had to be at the top of their game in each performance throughout the competition.
“It truly is a team sport,” Herzing said. “There are no individual accolades. You can’t look at our final score and say, ‘Oh, so and so scored X number of points,’ or ‘So and so had this many rebounds and really killed it on defense today.’ It truly is a team effort, and everything that everyone does adds up. We really have been talking with the girls the last few practices. We knew it was going to be close. We knew exactly who we were up against. We knew who we thought were going to be the top teams there in finals. We were hoping to be one of them, and we were right about everyone else who was in there with us. The last week of practice, we kept saying, ‘Every minor detail (matters). What can you do to improve? What can you do today to be one percent better? Because we can – all 24 of us – be one percent better, that might get us a point, and we know a point will be a huge difference.’ Obviously, when you see those finals scores, you see it wasn’t just a point. It was tenths of a point that made the difference for everyone.”
While acknowledging that it was tough to come in second by such a small margin, Herzing was happy that her team gave it their all.
“I don’t know what else we could have done (Saturday) to get those points,” Herzing said. “We did what we could do. Certainly, they’re already talking about, ‘Well next year we can do this,’ and ‘Next year we’ve got to do this,’ so I think that’s going to be motivating for them. Of course, I can’t lie, of course we wish our name would have been called last, but it’s still an outstanding accomplishment. It’s the best we’ve ever done as a school. We’re the first team ever from District 9 to get a medal at states in cheerleading. I certainly don’t want to minimize what we did accomplish.”
That does not mean that Herzing and the team are not already looking to the future though.
“We’ll kind of enjoy this moment and start thinking about next year soon,” Herzing said.
As for what the accomplishment of placing second in the state means to the team, Herzing shared that members of the squad referred to it as “validation for working hard,” an example of how “hard work pays off,” and that “setting goals and going after them is important.”
“They wanted to shout out to their strong support system: their parents, the administration at the school, and their peers,” Herzing added. “They know that there are a lot of schools that don’t have that kind of support, and it means a lot to them.”
Members of this year’s ECC competition cheerleading squad were Ellie Baron, Rylie Belsole, Madison Bierley, Holly Buttery, Brandi Casper, Annabelle Chemelli, Isabel Cicione, Italia Cicione, Brooke Dippold, Jenna Feronti, Tessa Fledderman, Sophia Gerg, Madisyn Hetrick, Josie Lawrie, Biancia Lynch, Anna Micale, Kiley Pesce, Alana Pistner, Sarah Reedy, Marissa Ruffner, Tiffany Sherry, Rachel Sloff, Madalynn Troha, and Raegan Weaver.
Additionally, assisting Herzing this season were Marlene Stubber and Abby Zampogna.