Leaderboard

I think guards at the top have always tried to push the limits, but it's definitely more encouraged now that we have a "Box 6" on the world sheets. Literally the highest achievement is "setting new standards." So that's what they're chasing now. But it does sometimes seem like we're entering figure skating territory, where the girls will load up their programs with quads or whatever and then fall on half of them and still somehow win. I always want to remind the guards that having the actual fundamental training to pull off the skills is a component of vocabulary scoring, even if sometimes the scores don't seem to reflect that.

Very excited to see Jenks (OK) attending a Texas regional!

It almost seems like the world groups are starting to try and reinvent the wheel in terms of difficulty, but as a result I don’t think we’ll ever see a performance that is clean like those of the 2012-2015 era. Last year at finals, outside of maybe 2 of the top 8, the scholastic and independent world groups had pretty major and consistent drops in their runs. Today Pride was cleaner than they were yesterday, but still had quite a few mistakes. I wonder if the attempts of difficulty are the cause of the drop in overall scores.