That's a Wrap on Cheer Season

Obviously, we've been out of town for the past few days because of Cheer Nationals. I'll cut to the chase - third place. That's where Alexis' team ended up. It's not as good as they had hoped, but it's certainly nothing to be ashamed of, so welp. That's that.

It's still crazy to me that this is the same team that won Nationals a few years ago after a season of being TERRIBLE. Alexis will tell you that, btw. She knew they were bad then and she will tell you that they were bad now, but they all pulled together and did their absolute best on the same day at the same time and it all worked. It will forever go down as one of those magical moments in her life.

This year didn't have the same magic. The team was actually REALLY good this year, but they made a couple of small mistakes and other teams were better than really good. And so it goes.

There's also the whole COVID cloud this year. While dance nationals happened to fall in that sweet spot when numbers were down, cheer nationals came along just as things are starting to get ugly again. Months ago it seemed wise that the competition had been moved to Knoxville instead of Nashville (to avoid other events) and it seemed like Tennessee was a decent choice. Now it's ... ugh.

Tennesee, y'all need to figure this whole thing out and quick. You can pretend there's no pandemic, but Miss Rona doesn't care that you don't want to know about her. She's coming for you. The 20% vaccination rates and near 0% mask compliance rates are not going to save you.

That said, the mask compliance rate at the cheer event was actually pretty good. There were definitely a lot of chin diapers floating around and a few blatant refusals to comply with the event mandate (masks were required for everyone the whole time, except the athletes while actually competing), but mostly people had it figured out.

We won't talk about the awards portion of the festivities. Things got messy right around then, which is why Mila and I disappeared. Watching one kid get a third place medal isn't worth another kid getting exposed to tons of potential virus monsters. And can I just say that thinking about those types of tradeoffs has me so freakin exhausted?

So exhausted.

If everybody who can would just get vaccinated, life would be far less complicated. Alas.

Here's to hoping next year comes with a championship and a lot less stress. Please and thank you.