SHELBY — It’s been a hotly contested West Michigan Conference cheer season, with the margins between the top teams and the middle teams in the 12-team WMC standings week to week smaller than in past years. However, if the Hart Pirates have their way, the end result will be the same: Their team on top.
Hart coach Roberta Cooke said she believes her team took a step in that direction at the Shelby jamboree Wednesday, in which the Pirates finished second to North Muskegon with 661.66 points - 25 behind the Norse, but also just a bit over five ahead of Shelby, which finished third.
Almost half that difference behind North Muskegon is explained by a 10-point penalty Hart took in round two - Cooke said the Pirates take that penalty every week, because Division 3 teams are supposed to have at least eight athletes on the mat in that round and Hart doesn’t have that many available.
“We automatically take that hit, and I think if we didn’t have that hit, it would be neck and neck,” Cooke said. “I believe, if we do exactly what we did tonight, we will either be conference champs or co-conference champs with North Muskegon. It really goes off of scoring, so it just depends on what they score next week.”
The Pirates were right there with North Muskegon after round one, scoring 210.3 points to check in only 3.4 behind the Norse. It was that second round that widened the gap, with a NM score of 200.98 to Hart’s 179.46 after the penalty points. The two teams scored nearly identically in round three, with just a 0.1-point edge to North Muskegon.
Cooke said she was excited about her team’s energy level in their performances in each round Wednesday.
“They really brought it with their energy,” Cooke said. “We usually struggle sometimes with our energy and our voices, and they really brought it tonight. That’s all I asked them to do, was just hype it up a little bit, and they were hyping themselves up before we went out, and we were just making sure everybody knew what they were doing.”
With a young roster - only two seniors - Cooke has had to work hard to keep her team sharp in her first season after Jen Hlady stepped down as head coach. It’s helped that the Pirates are hungry to keep their recent tradition of success going.
“What gets it going for them is they obviously want to keep their conference title,” Cooke said. “It’d be seven years in a row they’d be keeping it. The team dynamic, I think, is what really helps everything come together. The girls are great together. They get along...I’m going to be really sad when the season’s done because I feel like it set a standard for myself as a coach, how I set expectations for our team, and they’re doing a phenomenal job.”
The Tigers, meanwhile, remained consistent, as coach Sarah Schaner said third and fourth have been where they’ve been through the WMC season. With such a close spread between the top several teams - just over 51 points separated the first-place Norse from Whitehall in fifth place - it’s brought a good atmosphere to the meets.
“It’s created such a competitive atmosphere, but such a happy atmosphere too,” Schaner said. “Everyone’s pushing each other. No one’s running away with anything. It’s so close that it’s always down to round three, and so it pushes all of our teams to be better - not even being better than each other, but being better than we were last week.
“It’s a very long-standing conference, and...to have so many teams be competitive, we love it.”
The Tigers, like Hart, are posting scores that probably put them around the borderline of qualifying out of the district meet for the regionals, and she said that’s a focus point for the team as they hope to compete at the highest levels they can.
“I think the key for us to get out of districts into regionals will be the drive,” Schaner said. “We’ve got a great group of kids, and now we just need that final push from them to progress to the (post)season. They’ve got good material. They know their stuff. We just need that spark.”
