EK season
reason to cheer

Thursday,
March 16, 2006

By
Steve Vedder

The Grand Rapids Press

East Kentwood competitive cheer coach Stacey
Sheler was afraid to share her team's surprising score with her players after
the first round of Saturday's state meet.

One of the favorites to place in
the meet, Sheler was astounded to learn the Falcons had managed just a score
of 191 -- the team's lowest mark of the season -- after the opening of three
rounds.

Sheler elected not to say anything
and let the Falcons move on to the next two rounds with only a couple words
of encouragement, but no profound advice.

"I thought, 'How did we get
that?' " Sheler said. "I thought maybe
everyone will score that low, too."

That wasn't how it worked, but the
Falcons caught fire anyway. They scored a 222.5 in the next round and then
ended the day with a 307 despite a fall. The showing was enough to hoist East Kentwood into a third-place finish at 720.7.

Sheler said the finish was
outstanding considering the low score in the first round and then the fall in
Round 3.

"We were disappointed because
we had wanted to do our best," she said. "But then all of a sudden
we went from sixth to third."

The finish completes a successful
season in which the Falcons won the Grandville Invitational in early January
and then battled Grandville back and forth all season until the state finals,
where the Bulldogs wound up 7.2 points ahead to finish second.

En route to the finals, East Kentwood's season included a school-record 740
score and a victory in the regionals, snapping a
string of 11 straight by Grandville.

"It was awesome," Sheler
said. "We kept telling the kids how good they were and then we just
waited for them to put it all together."

Part of the team's strength was
experience. Five girls from East Kentwood's
second-place finish in the 2003-04 state meet returned to this year's team in
Danielle Mowry, Shaina
Smith, Andrea Phillips, Thea Thom and Ashley Deruiter. The same core of players was sixth in last
year's meet.

"To have that experience was
huge because your confidence level goes up," Sheler said. "We were
a confident team out there and this team had so much more pressure on it than
it did last year."

East Kentwood will lose nine seniors, but will
have 17 performers back for next season.

"We're going to have almost
our whole second round back," she said. "Now they know what it's
like to be in a big meet."