A week after receiving a superior one rating at the Blue Valley Southwest Cheer Competition, the cheer team finished third place at the KSHSAA Game Day Spirit Showcase Competition Saturday at the Topeka Expocentre. The Huskies competed against eighteen other teams in the 6A division of the inaugural competition on Nov. 19. Head cheer coach Megan Geenans said the Game Day competition is different than all the other competitions they compete in.

“They’re like night and day,” Geenans said. “Normal cheer competitions involve difficulty and are a three minute, high intensity performance. The Game Day Showcase is more about leadership and crowd-leading abilities, so they’re testing the cheerleaders on how they interact with the fan section and how they can get the crowd to follow along with them. ”

Due to these changes, the team split their practices, spending one half on their normal cheer competitions and the other half practicing for the Game Day Showcase. Senior captain Ally Monaghan said they also hired a choreographer to help them prepare.

“We showed him our fight song and he helped us make it Game Day Showcase ready,” Monaghan said. “He added stunts and tumbling in, but they were different stunts than our regular competitions because they were stunts we can do while still cheering along with the crowd.”

Monaghan said the rule differences led to deductions in the preliminary round, but the costly mistake in the finals was upside-down signs.

“It was a huge disappointment to us because we’ve never had that issue before in practice,” Monaghan said. “We thought that we would for sure finish in sixth place, so placing third and getting recognized and getting a plaque and medals makes us feel very happy and pleased.”

Although Geenans said she knows how close they were to a first place medal, she said she is very proud of the team’s finish and plans to prepare similarly for next year, in order to maintain a high level of competition.

“We obviously wanted to win, but the fact that they made it to finals and they got third place made me super proud,” Geenans said. “I’m pretty satisfied with the amount of preparation we did, and next year we’ll probably get the same choreographer again and split practices the same way.”