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The team practices during the team pajama day for their next competition: districts.

     The Varsity Competitive Cheer team won the Wayne County championship Feb. 2 at the Tri-County Competition.

The 16-member team has steadily improved all season before earning their highest scores yet on both the first and third rounds of the competition which was held at Warren Mott High School, according to coach Ashley Gerbi.

“We were really on all on the same page that day,” third-year team member Mirella Villani ’20 said. “We really stepped it up and made it worth it.”

Martha Dawson ’20, also in her third year with the team, said the team has never won counties before, so being able to win such a big competition felt amazing.

“I feel like the cheer team doesn’t get a lot of recognition at the school,” Dawson said. “There’s definitely those sports that sort of are Grosse Pointe South. It’s like, ‘yeah we have a cheer team,’ but to win like that it’s like Grosse Pointe South won that competition.”

According to Gerbi, the team has been practicing since December to prepare for the competition.

“We have been making changes and improvements to our rounds as we have been getting feedback from the judges so we could have the best performances possible,” Gerbi said.

According to Villani, the team knew they had a fair shot at winning, so they pushed each other really hard to win.

“We have never really had a win like that so I think it was good to up our confidence,” Villani said.

After seeing the shirts that awaited the county champs, Dawson said the team pushed each other more.

“We were sort of mentally pumping each other up a lot just to get each other in the mindset like ‘we can get first place, let’s work for first place,’” Dawson said.

According to Gerbi, the girls brought a lot of energy to the mat.

“One person can be really on and do really well, but if 15 people aren’t then it’s not going to make a difference,” Villani said. “But all 16 of us were on that day.”

After working so hard all season, Villani said it felt really good to put out three solid rounds in competition.

“After round 3, we knew we killed it,” Villani said. “We didn’t even have to see the scores, after that it didn’t even matter if we got first or got medals or trophies because we were so proud of what we put out there. It felt like we could have left then and been perfectly fine.”

Villani said winning the competition motivated her to do that well again.

“It was amazing for the girls because we have some really tough teams that we compete against,” Gerbi said. “They have been through a lot of ups and downs this season so they got to see their hard work finally did pay off.”

The Blue Devils finished third in the Mac blue. The girls next head to Warren Mott for their district competition Feb. 16.