The Final Score: A piece of UAAP cheerdance heaven

When the UP men’s basketball team completed its 0-14 campaign, the UP Pep Squad’s victory in the UAAP Cheerdance Competition became a foregone conclusion. Poetic justice works that way. Surely our “iskolars ng bayan" deserve a modicum of joy in what has been a joyless basketball season. But the euphoria over cheerdance superiority comes at a high price. The cheerdance competition goes unnoticed by the rest of the world. Yet it means the world to those who practice in school deep into the night, when classmates have long gone home and basketball teams have finished training for the day. They work on gymnastics, hip-hop, ballet and everything else a winning routine demands. It’s a compact version of Cirque de Soleil; only the pressure to perform it correctly the first time is just as intense. The annual cheerdance battle royale is the Olympics of the obsessed. They train like US Marines obsessed with the perfect toss and sturdiest lift. Combatants here create pyramid formations the way a bartender concocts drinks. The permutations are endless. The artistry is infinite. The anxiety is also unforgiving. It’s easier to watch the last two minutes of a championship game than it is to watch a 6-minute cheerdance routine. In basketball, one turnover can be rectified with a defensive gem. In cheerdancing, a split second’s worth of human imperfection can obliterate months of painstaking effort. It’s a ruthless set-up. One flash of confusion and it’s over. Young men and women, however, smile through physical and emotional torture. It boggles me how they don’t faint at the end of routines. Two hard gasps after the last dance step, the pride in a pristine performance is obvious, the pain in an effort not good enough for third place is even more visible. I, therefore, admire cheerdance squads for wanting to march through persecution by pompoms. The gates of cheerleading paradise, however, will allow only two types of winners to enter: the team that wins first place and teams that overachieve regardless of how high they place. Ideally, all teams are granted entry one way or another. We always want basketball players to show spirit on the floor. Some have it. Some never will. Cheerdancers must have it in abundance. It’s not because they smile a lot or stay perky for three hours straight even when their teams are being mauled by twenty points in the last five minutes. It has something to do with resilience and resolve. Then, we begin to understand why the UP-UST rivalry is the Ateneo-La Salle of cheerdancing wars and why eight cheering squads turn the Big Dome into one big university fair. Pep squads root for teams that don’t always reciprocate with wins. A basketball team vying for the championship has a best-of-three series. Cheerdance squads have one day. Fortitude comes in spandex and skirts. What else would drive them to undergo cheerdance hell with the promise of reaching pep squad heaven? -- GMANews.TV