WAYZATA-The Brainerd Warrior dance team finished seventh in high kick and 11th in jazz at the Wayzata Invitational Saturday.
Warriors coach Cindy Clough said it was a long day of competition with 18 teams in each division.
"In kick, we felt we performed our best so far this season," she said. "We had made a lot of changes during the week and we were happy how they managed them. Sometimes you have nervous errors and memory errors due to changes, but the girls handled them. I feel we are physically stronger than usual and the team really has stamina. This is going to help us going into sections.
"With two weeks until sections, we are excited as to where we are sitting. We saw a lot of people in our section and fared pretty well. We felt pretty good as to how we placed with this group of people. Some of these teams have really been on the rise and the competition keeps getting tougher and tougher.
"I feel the conference meets in the metro have forced teams to improve as they have Monday night meets in which they are continually trying to raise the bar. Being outstate we do not see these teams as often so we felt pretty good where we placed. Tech came out ahead of us, and we have beat them three times this season in kick. We feel we can get past them at sections.
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"Other than them, we placed higher than all teams in our section who were there, so we felt super about that. We will watch a lot of film this week and see where we need to improve and if we need to trim down to a smaller number. We are dancing 30 girls right now which is pretty high. Even Eastview is not dancing that many so we need to consider if our scores may go up if we were to trim down to a few less people."
In jazz, Tech, Blaine and Anoka finished ahead of Brainerd.
"So we really have to go back to he drawing board to make it out of our section," Clough said. "They will only take the top three teams in the section so we have to increase our scores. We will work at fine-turning and cleaning some parts. We are technically very solid but we have had some issues with performance anxiety and inconsistency. Our dance is slow and when adrenaline kicks in, sometimes our athletes are getting ahead of themselves. So we will keep drilling timing and work harder on confidence and control.
"We are trying some new relaxation strategies. We also may have to trim down to fewer dancers. In jazz, teams often dance smaller numbers to increase execution scores. In past years, when we trim down, our scores go up. We try to leave as many kids in as we can until it right before sections as we never know who is going to rise to the challenge."
In the junior varsity competition, Brainerd was ninth in kick and 14th in jazz.
Kick: 1-Wayzata, 2-Lakeville North, 3-Lakeville South, 4-Maple Grove, 5-St. Cloud Tech, 6-Edina, 7-Brainerd
Jazz: 1-Eastivew, 2-Wayzata, 3-Edina, 4-Lakeville North, 5-Lakeville South, 6-Anoka, 7-Eden Prairie, 8-St. Cloud Tech, 9-Hopkins, 10-Blaine, 11-Brainerd
Next: Brainerd at Blaine Invite Saturday.
