The Antioch varsity cheerleaders were nothing short of busy this past weekend. With a competition on Saturday, January 11 at Lake Zurich, and another competition the following day, January 12 at Buffalo Grove, they were busy leaving everything out on the mats.

With having two competitions this weekend, it gave the Sequoits a lot of mat time to go all out and tweak small things in their performance. 

“At each competition we have improved tremendously, at Buffalo Grove we hit zero [deductions],” senior Kayla Grenke said.

Hitting zero was a big thing for the Sequoits this weekend, as this season they have raised the intensity of their routine. In their past competitions they have building up their routine to the intensity they are now performing at.

With making tweaks to their past performances, they were able to get 2nd place at both of their competitions. The Sequoits are taking these performances as motivation to keep on improving, as the competition they saw this weekend, is most of what they will be seeing at state.

“This weekend we competed against some of the teams we will be competing against at conference and state,” senior Paul Valdivia-Valencia said. “For example we saw Lakes compete and we will be seeing them at conference.”

Although the Sequoits have their goal of winning state running in their mind, they are keeping their eyes on the prize to improve for their upcoming NLCC competition.

“For the most part we are ready for the conference,” junior Kylee Craig said. “However we always like to keep improving to be better than the last competition. Before conference we still have to clean up some parts of the routine and we are going to try to up the difficulty of our stunts.”

The Sequoits will be hitting the mats for conference on their day off, Monday, January 20th at Grayslake North as they continue on their road to State.