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Football season

Every fall it’s football season for American high schools. This means that there is a football game on every friday night for 10 weeks. Another name for this season is Friday night lights (fnl) because the games are on friday evenings. In total, we had 4 away games and 6 home games.

We think football is a complicated sport, there are a lot of players who change the whole time. Which players are on the field, depends if the team is in offense or defense. Each team has eleven players on the field regardless of they’re playing offense or defense.

The team with the ball is in offense. They have to score a touchdown or a field goal and they do this by running with the ball and trying to pass the other team without getting tackled. The other team is on defense, because they are trying to defend their end zone.

The team in offense gets four downs to advance minimal ten yards (that’s about 9,1 meters). If they don’t succeed, they turn the ball to the other team so the roles switch. When a team gets a player with the ball in the end zone, they score a touchdown and get six points. If they kick the ball in the goal after a touchdown, they get an extra point.

Sometimes, the team has only one more chance to score a touchdown, then they can kick the ball in the goal. If they do this right, they get three points for a field goal. Sometimes they chose for this so the chance at getting points is bigger.

We need to be on the field 45 minutes before the games start. Because we still have a lot of time before the game actually starts, we usually first go to the bathroom so that we don’t need to to during the game. After that, it is time to put our bows in our hair and warm up our stunts. When we still have some time to spare after this, we normally take pictures so that we have a lot of fun memories to look back to.

We cheer at every game, even when it is raining or freezing cold. The game can only be cancelled when there is lightning because of the big open field where we play on. Our task is to hype up the crowd by doing cheers and stunts. home games are (in our opinion) more fun than away games, because our crowd is way bigger and our band is playing. At the beginning of every game, the band walks on the field to make a big M (what stands for Mexico) and play the fight song. When they’re playing this, we have to dance in between them. After they do the fight song for the first time, we go back to the side line. That’s the moment that the band plays the anthem. We stand in a row with all the cheerleaders and put one hand behind our backs and one on our heart with the poms still in our hands. After that, we run back on the field to stand in two lines. The band plays the fight song again. When they finish that, the band will play another song and the football players will run on the field. They all collect in the bulldog. When that’s full, they run between our rows, while we’re doing a dance.

At the beginning of the game it’s time for the kickoff. A kickoff is when the the ‘’kicking team’’ kicks the ball to the ‘’receiving team’’. The receiving team must return the ball to the end zone (they try to score a touchdown). Kickoffs take place at the start of each half play, at the beginning of overtime and after scoring plays. During the kickoff we put five flyers in the air to cheer up the crowd. After that it’s time to go to our spots to continue with our first cheer called fired up to win. What cheers we’re doing next depends on how the game is going. During the first break we do a stunt with the whole cheer squad, the rest of the game we just do normal cheers.

During home games, we cheer at the dawg pound for 15 minutes. The dawg pound is where the students sit and has a different theme every week. Everyone dresses up in this theme, that’s part of the school spirit. Some examples of the theme’s are: hawain night, jersey night, pink out and camouflage.

Pinkout is every year in October for breast cancer awareness. For this month, we have pink poms and bows and at the pink out game we wear a special design pink out shirt.

At the end of every game, the crowd sings a song to celebrate the school, we all collect in one big circle at the field to do this.

Especially at the end of the season it can be really cold. Then we can wear our warm ups. This means that we have to wear black yoga pants with our cheer jacket. During the breaks we try to stay warm by going inside or by capsize a blanket.

When we have an away game, we go with the school bus to a different school to cheer. The first time we had to ride the bus, we were really excited, but after a few minutes we found out that the school bus wasn’t really comfortable. Most of the away games, we have to share the bus with the freshmen and sophomore football players.

They have to be at the field earlier, so most of the time we drop them off at the field and we go to a fast food restaurant to fill in the time. Most cheerleaders get a small snack, because we have to wait for dinner until after the game (this is usually around 9:30). When the game ends, we go back to the bus where we get pizza, if it’s really cold, we eat it on the bus, otherwise we eat it outside the bus. Most of the times, the cheerleaders are done way earlier than the football players, so we have to wait. In that case we have to wait until they’re done and then we can finally get on the bus for the ride home.

This Friday we have our last football game! It's pretty sad and we're happy that we had this experience. Now we're ready for basketball season where we don't have to freeze to death outside ;).

Reacties

Reacties

Jennifer

Het was weer heerlijk om te lezen! Nu maar hopen dat the Bulldogs hoog eindigen op de ranking. Aan jullie zal het niet liggen!

Wilma

Geweldig weer om te lezen , weer een hoop geleerd over football!! Leuke ervaring en op naar het basketbal ! Ik kijk alweer uit naar de volgende foto’s !
Lots of love ??‍♀️

Ronald

Ha Joy and Floor, another great story. Indeed a straing sport American football but fun! And now for the cold winter Months into the hall for basketbal!??

Lou en Elly

Heerlijk om te lezen ??

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