Dragons cheer third at Oxford Invitational

BY DAN STICKRADT

STAFF WRITER

Often a score may not
always reflect how well a team competes. That was the case at Saturday's
Oxford Invitational.

Several competitive
cheer coaches felt the scores were a little unusually low for a mid-January
invitational, but the results gives coaches and their teams a chance to raise
the bar a greater distance during their next competition round.

Three area teams competed
in the nine-school field at Oxford.
Chesaning won the title with 694.6 points with Allen Park
just behind in second place (692.1 points), while Lake
Orion claimed third (672.2), Troy
Athens fourth (660.5) and host Oxford
seventh (568.7).

"I thought, for
our first time out this season, we did a really good job," said Lake Orion
coach Nancy deAvila. "We still have some things to tighten up,
especially in the third round. But we had a freshman flier out there that has
never competed at the high school level and some other freshmen and
sophomores out on the floor.

"Our second round
was our best. I think our score was only about five points lower than our
best second-round last year and that was good to see," deAvila said. "But I thought that we could have been
a couple of points better overall."

Athens coach Stephanie
Brodsky was somewhat surprised her team finished 34.1 points off the pace.

"I felt our
scores were not (indicative) of how well we performed," Brodsky said.
"I thought we would have scored much higher. Our stunt (third) round is
where we've put a lot of work into and I thought we did a very good job in
that round. But we were still only fourth in that round.

"We'll just get
ready for our next competition and try to receive some higher scores
there."

Athens was second in the
first round (185.4), but finished fourth in both the second round (193.0) and
third round (283.5) -- which is the round with the highest degree of
difficulty.

Lake Orion was third in the
first round (178.5), third in the second round (200.2) and remained third in
the final round (293.5).

Oxford only has 16 athletes on its varsity
roster and five were out with injuries, forcing the Wildcats to change some
routines and drop some difficulty. The Wildcats were tied in fifth (169.5)
after the first round, finished sixth in the second round (175.2) and were
ninth in the third round (224.0) due to a penalty infraction, which dropped
them to seventh in the final standings.

All three area schools
will compete Jan. 25 at the Rochester Stoney Creek Invitational, then again
face off Jan. 28 at the Lake Orion Invitational, which is one of the state's
largest invitationals.

Originally published January 19, 2006