Holland Christian walks away with title

Thursday,
February 03, 2005

By Jeff
Chaney

The Grand Rapids Press

Last year the competitive
cheer teams in the O-K Rainbow Tier 2 Conference spent the season chasing
champion Holland Christian.

Welcome to this year.

Most of the teams in the
conference were at the Comstock Park Invitational on Saturday, and Holland Christian
walked away with the title with a score of 723.

DeWitt was second at 701,
followed by Sparta at 692.5 and Comstock Park at 682.

Sparta coach Kensey
Doolittle was happy with her team's performance, but still would like to get
closer to Holland Christian in scoring.

Sparta coach pleased

"We had a good day,"
Doolittle said. "We still have things to work on, but we did very well.

"We are going to try
and catch Holland Christian. Going against them makes us better. Competing
against them makes us get more focused because they are such a good team."

Comstock Park coach Kathy Felty was also pleased
with her team's performance, especially the Panthers' second-round performance.

There, Comstock Park
was the highest-scoring team with 209 points, one point better than Holland
Christian.

"We were only seven points
behind Holland Christian going into round three, and we didn't have a couple
things go our way in round three," Felty said.

Problems they can fix

"Usually round three
hasn't been a problem for us. We had the highest round two Saturday,
we just had a couple problems that cost us. But those are all workable things.
The difficult things went well."

The Panthers believe they
have problems they can fix because the majority of their schedule is ahead of
them.

"We have an exciting
few weeks for us," Felty said. "Our 682 was our highest of the year.
What we want to see is improvement every week."

Doolittle says the Spartans
also have some work to do before the postseason begins later this month.

"We are going to work
on our first and second rounds," Doolittle said. "Our third round
seems to be pretty strong."

© 2005 Grand Rapids Press. Used with permission