Rams win with two clean routines

BAR HARBOR – The Bangor High cheerleading team didn’t have its competition routine finished until Monday. That was less than a week before the Rams had to perform it for the first time at Saturday’s Penobscot Valley Conference cheerleading championships.

But the Rams performed the routine cleanly twice to win their second straight conference title at Mount Desert Island High School’s Bernard Parady Gymnasium.

Bangor scored 148.9 points in the championship round, holding off runner-up Brewer by 5.2 points.

“If you asked us two weeks ago if we thought we were going to be here right now, I don’t know,” said Hannah Bennett, one of Bangor’s five senior captains.

Now only did the Rams win, but they defended their 2005 title.

Brewer, which was third last year, took runner-up honors with 143.7 points. John Bapst of Bangor, the 2005 runner-up, was third with 141.5 points, followed by fourth-place Hampden with 136.5 points.

Mattanawcook of Lincoln, which moved up from Class C this year, was fifth with 126.6 points. Old Town earned 124.1 points for sixth and Caribou rounded out the top seven with 116.5 points.

The Rams played it safe, with single twists on the dismounts out of their stunts. The strategy paid off – Bangor and John Bapst were the only teams to perform twice without penalties.

Bangor’s stunts were strong in both rounds with few shakes from the flyers and no dropped stunts.

“It’s not worth it to us to put in the double-twists and stuff that we know we might not hit,” said Bangor captain Caitlyn Johnson. “We’d rather have a clean routine and something we know we can hit and looks really good when we do.”

The Rams scored 3.1 points higher in the final round.

“It wasn’t that we were any cleaner,” said captain Sarah Coleman. “It was that we smiled and sold the routine.”

The rest of the Bangor squad includes captains Jocelyn Christiansen and Kristen Cote, along with Ashley Bigda, Maria Coffin, Emily Cormier, Katie Cox, Chelsea Elston, Kalee Gurshick, Stephanie Hosmer, Katie Levelle, Courtney Maynard, Katie Soo, Nicole Stairs, Corinne Vaillancourt, Abby Whitten, and alternates Ariel Hall and Amy Stubbs.

The Witches were more than a little surprised to finish in second place considering their five-point penalty, which was assessed when a tumbler touched her hands to the floor on a roundoff tuck landing.

“We didn’t hit it as well as we thought we did in the first round,” said Kristin Wood, who co-captains the Witches with Ali Caron. “We were kind of shocked, but we were going up against really good teams.”

Brewer dropped a few stunts, including the left side of one of its pyramids. But the Witches also had double-twisting dismounts out of some of their stunts and moved into the top point range for tumbling because they had nine tumblers.

The rest of the participating teams were Bucksport, Nokomis of Newport, Ellsworth, Hermon, Presque Isle, Foxcroft, and MDI.

The same group will vie for the Big East Conference title next Saturday at Hermon High.

The competition was held up for about 30 minutes when Nokomis sophomore flyer Kya Wolfe fell on senior base Ashley Perry during the Warriors’ preliminary routine.

Perry was taken by ambulance to the hospital, but was back at the high school with a precautionary neck brace by the end of the competition. She said she likely pulled a neck muscle.