Competitive season is a lot different from sideline. This season comes with 3 rounds. Round 1 focuses on hitting motions, correct formations, and jumps. Round 1 must have between 5-7 formation changes and there can be minimal changes as well. Round 1 is full of cool and fun things all in 1 choreography. Round 2, everyone must look the same. There is a specific 10-count that must be the beginning, every team does the 10-count, and it changes every 2 years. Round 2 has motions, formation changes, jumps, and standing tumbling. Round 3 is a combination of round 1 and round 2 with an addition of stunting. Round 3 has many different things going on such as tumbling, stunting, words and formation changes.  

When it comes to scoring it is different for each round. Round 1 is scored on jumps, vocals, team coordination, and general impression. The perfect score you can get in round 1 is 240. Round 2 is scored on the 10-count, jumps, tumbling and general impression. The perfect score for round 2 is 234. Round 3 is scored on choreography, vocals, team coordination and general impression. The perfect score for round 3 is 320. All 3 rounds have the same categories but round 3 has a couple different ones. The highest you can get scored with those categories are 10s and sometimes you can get bonuses. A perfect total score is 794.  

On Friday, December 9th the Dakota Competitive Cheer program competed for the first time at Richmond High School. We competed in all 3 rounds. By the end of the competition, we placed 4th place and our scores where right where they needed to be for the first comp. In round 1 we scored 233. Round 2 we scored 223 and for Round 3 we scored 297. Our total score was 753. We took 4th place and walked away with our heads held high and practiced harder for the next competition.