FFL Finale

After 7 years of cheerleading for the FFL, Sophie's season finally came to an end last week. She literally started cheering in kindergarten & has cheered every fall since then. The weekend before Halloween, they were all set to perform their dad & daughter halloween routine for halftime and this year it was troll themed:

Obviously, the girls were Princess Poppy & the dads were Papa Troll. They had practiced all week & we got to the game early for them to practice some more. Of course, we took lots of pictures before the game & you can see the weather in the background:

We have a photographer on the team, and she was taking pictures of everyone, so I didn't take any so imagine my disappointment when this is the only picture I found of my 2:

Oh geez. It happened to be the perfect weekend that wasn't too busy so most of the siblings were there also:

We literally got there an hour early & the weather continued to get worse so of course when it was our time to play, there was lightening. And then it started to rain. We ended up spending at least an hour sitting in our car waiting for the storm to pass so we could finally start the game. And we eventually did, much later. But not all of our girls stayed, and it was a mess outside so needless to say, they just cheered & didn't do their planned performance. Such a bummer!

Thankfully we made up for it the next weekend. It may have been the day after Halloween but the weather was perfect, so we went for round 2:

And this time I remembered to take a picture of my little trolls:

That was our last official regular season game & then the next weekend we played in the first playoff game. These boys were ready to go & so were the fans:

Unfortunately, it was a long & disappointing game. Lots of penalties, lots of flags, a few injuries & even a player & a parent were ejected. We were tied 6-6 the entire game & they literally scored in the last 1 1/2 minutes of the game for the win. It was kind of heartbreaking losing that way. The next night, their coaches had our cheer banquet & they went all out:

It was so fun to see them all dressed up:

We had a private room at an Italian restaurant where we all got to eat, visit, watch a slideshow, see the awards presentation & they got their final team gift, which was the cutest blanket with their cheer picture on it. Sophie LOVED it:

We couldn't be prouder of Sophie for seeing her commitment to cheer all the way through. Not only does she love doing it with her friends, but we have seen big improvement in her also:

and a big thank you to her coaches the past 3 years - Liz & Misty for making the girls who they are. They have really learned a lot from them & I am thankful she will take that knowledge & apply it to middle school cheer tryouts in the spring:

Farewell FFL - While we will miss watching her cheer, I am excited to have part of my weekend back!