Blue Devils back on top Brewer and Bangor qualify

AUGUSTA – Like the value of a dollar or a big-league home run, a point isn’t worth what it used to be in a competition cheering meet.

What sent heads spinning and tongues wagging and passed as the score to beat a year ago might not allow your team to put fingerprint smudges on a trophy this season.

Just ask reigning Class A state champion Brewer High School, which weaved together a solid three minutes Saturday that most cheerleaders and their coaches would envy. It simply wasn’t enough to ward off eventual champion Lewiston and runner-up Oxford Hills of South Paris, whose late heroics relegated the Witches to fourth place in the Eastern Maine championship at the Augusta Civic Center.

Brewer registered 145.1 of a possible 175 points, a number consistent with its performance at last year’s regional meet. In other words, the Witches set the bar for their new Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference neighbors and watched the competition cross the hurdle with room to spare.

“I think the competition is way up from last year,” said Brewer coach Kristie Reed. “Not that you can go by scores alone, but the scores right now in the East are a lot higher than the West.”

Case in point: Scarborough, the third-ranking school in the Western Class A segment of Saturday’s all-day event, would not have cracked the top six or qualified for the state meet in the East.

Edward Little of Auburn (third with 146.5 points), Lawrence of Fairfield and Bangor also moved on to the Feb. 9 finals in Augusta.

Bangor (141.7 points) enjoyed a spacious gap over Hampden Academy (126.3) for the final transfer spot.

Not long ago, Lewiston and Brewer were the only teams in the region with every athlete on the mat capable of tumbling. Thanks to a scoring system that rewards degree of difficulty, those somersaulting sensibilities virtually guaranteed those two powers a one-two finish, barring any deductions.

High-energy, high-risk routines have become the norm, and every team is awash with aerialists, forcing even the elite squads to make a quantum leap from year to year.

“Tumbling has come way up,” Reed said. “It’s a lot more fun to watch, because you see so many good teams.”

It also leaves no guarantee that regional and state results will echo those of early-season meets.

Oxford Hills won last Monday’s KVAC competition. Lewiston? Sixth, good for a week worth of soul-searching and second thoughts about its routine set to James Bond movie theme music.

“We changed our attitude,” said Lewiston senior Jenni Golletti. “We sold it (the routine) today like never before.”

Lewiston co-captains Golletti, Lauren Cartmel, Lysa Laverdiere, Amy Nelson and Samantha Tanguay didn’t have to dig too deeply into the archives to give the Blue Devils’ younger cheerleaders an inspiring history lesson.

Before Brewer broke through with its initial Class A title last February, Lewiston danced off with state laurels in 2003, 2004 and 2006.

“We just knew what we had to do, and we got it done,” Laverdiere said. “We were very confident today. That’s what pushed us over the top.”

Dominique DeFilipp, Alicia Hallahan, Ashley Martin, Ashley Smith and Alycia Stevens are the lone seniors in Brewer’s lineup of 16 girls and one boy. The Witches sent an equal number of freshmen onto the floor.

“We are young, and we made just some little mistakes all throughout our routine,” said Reed. “You can’t make mistakes at this level.”

Still, the Witches need look no further than their conquerors Saturday to recognize that fourth-to-first is not an impossible climb.

“You clean it up. You change nothing dramatically at this point,” Reed said of her team’s agenda the next two weeks. “It’s absolutely too late. You clean it up. You work on confidence. You do little things.”