Here We Go Again

It's 3 o'clock in the morning and my alarm goes off. Yep, you read that, 3 A.M. We started our journey to LaCrosse, Wisconsin at 4:30.
Yesterday marked the first day that our hard work as a show choir would pay off. Viterbo is one of, if not THE first show choir competition of the year and we were there. We had two cross-town rivals also competing and for them (most likely), winning is everything. Our director has given us speech upon speech about how we cannot go to a competition in the hopes/expectations of winning, we must go into the competition to give our best show and the results may or may not reflect that.

My personal feeling is that I just love to perform. I am completely non-competitive. I "play" tennis. Or at least I used to. I had played since I was four and I was pretty decent. But what happened was that everybody I played with began to have to competition of who was better and such, and I'm really not into that. I wasn't the best by any means, but like I said, I was pretty good. I would do okay at tournaments, but would definitely never win. And at tournaments I usually just cared about getting past the first round and anything after that was great but didn't really matter. So when things got more competitive, and I found out I was better at singing and show choir, naturally I took that over tennis.

As my director says, I do not take show choir as a competition. But every time I go onstage, I do my best and leave my heart out there. That I think is the most wonderful thing, knowing you did your best and that whatever happens, you will always win in your heart.

This was incredibly essential at Viterbo. With these cross-town rivals, we couldn't let ourselves think that because we had done better than them last year, that the same would happen this year.

After day rounds, we were tied for third behind our cross-town rivals. After last year, I thought this was a good thing. You see, last year, we had a reputation for starting out on top, and then dropping after finals. So maybe this would be our time to start down and move up. After finals, we did move up, but only by a half a place. When we were tied for third, that means we were between 3rd and 4th. So we beat out who we tied with, and took third for our own.

Sure it was kind of a bummer to lose to our cross-town rivals, but who cares? We had a HUGE improvement from our day rounds and 2 of our judges told us we had the best ballad by far. So I take that as a win in its own. Congratulations show choir!

Will you let it be a competition?