Judging

As the competition formally gets underway, you decide to play along as a judge. There are 16 teams competing for the national award with students from colleges from all over the country. Most of the teams are all-girls, with a handful of them having a few male members. Immediately, you mentally cross those teams off your list. 1 team from Alabama consists of all blonde, long-hair girls, almost as if they were selected just for their appearances.

Once the competition starts, you follow the lead of the other judges, lifting up your score card the last to match theirs. You don't really know how to judge a cheerleading performance, although some routines are obviously spectacular and some are really horrible and uncoordinated. However, for the most part, you're just sitting there with a front row view of the beautiful girls dancing around in their tight outfits that show off the nubile bodies underneath. The more you watch, the more you understand how fit cheerleaders have to be just to perform their routines. The first round of the competition takes about 2 hours to finish, and by the end, only the 4 teams with the highest scores are left to compete for the final round. The all-blonde team from Alabama is still in, as is the team in gold and green that you had encountered earlier when you first arrived.

There's a 1 hour break before the final round begins, and the other judges are go off to do their own thing, although the older woman who has been sitting beside you is jotting away on a legal pad with her notes and observations on the cheerleading routines. She seems to be taking this really seriously, and if you had to guess, she probably has been in cheerleading her entire life, first as a cheerleader, then as a coach, and now a judge. You leave her alone and wander off to explore, walking past a team of sadden girls who look like they've been crying after they found out they were eliminated. You stifle your laughter as you pass them, remembering that 1 of their cheerleaders had stumbled mid-way through their routine and accidentally kicked 1 of her teammates in the shin, causing them both to fall. They eventually recovered, but even as an uninformed observer, you knew it was too late. The 4 teams that qualified for the final round were all near perfect in the execution of their routines.