The Real McCoy
Reports on the death of sportsmanship are greatly exaggerated
By Brent E. McCoy thereal@roadrunner.com

It's official, the competition cheerleading season is here. I know this because we just returned from my daughter's first long trip with the group she cheers with, the CheerForce AllStars. We went to San Francisco for a day of fun, bonding and cheerleading. I had no idea how much bonding I would do in the following days.

This comes at an opportune time since there is so much negative reporting on the state of sportsmanship in the world. These reports have touched cycling, football, baseball, basketball, soccer and others. There is, however, good news out there.

This is not a hidden sales pitch for CheerForce. There are many good organizations out there. This is simply a story about one of them. I trust my daughter to this group because it is a quality organization, and, more importantly, it is run by quality people. They realize that winning is important, but they also stress quality and sportsmanship to their charges and parents. After all, it's usually the parents that need the occasional reminder when it comes to sportsmanship.

For the trip to San Francisco, the cheerleaders went together on four buses, and the parents were offered an opportunity to share space on the buses. As attractive as eight or nine hours on a bus with 40 or 50 teens and preteens sounded, I decided to drive. Also, my daughter threatened a grizzly suicide if I set foot on the bus.

We made San Francisco in good time and beat the buses by several hours.

The next morning, we all woke up refreshed and headed off for the day's event. It was a beautiful day, and there were a lot of groups there. One of the best things about these events is when folks from different organizations and different cities make friends among themselves. They'll all go out and try to win, but usually they will wish each other good luck as well.

I was looking forward to enjoying the competition and getting some good photographs and meeting some folks from the other teams.

After the first round of competition, I headed out of sight to the back of the building to do something that I know is wrong and something that I'm not proud of. As I reached the rear of the building, there was another gentleman there for the same purpose.

I could see that he was staring at my body, and I began checking out the body that he had. After a few moments we nodded at each other. Now that contact had been made, I decided to make the first move. I mentioned that I had noticed how nice his body was and he replied in kind that I had one of the finest bodies around. We had reached common ground.

Not only were we using the same camera bodies, we were using the same lenses. Now aren't you a little embarrassed? This is a family paper, you know. We exchanged tips on techniques and agreed to try each other's ideas and chat again after the next round. We wished each other's team good luck, and we stayed in touch throughout the day. Each time we met, we congratulated each other on their team's performance and compared photographs. I'm sure we'll meet again along the way and pick up right where we left off.

The teams did well, and everyone seemed to have a good time. This bonding thing was working. A group of us decided to go to the waterfront for dinner.

We had a nice dinner and headed back to the hotel. On the way back, we had a chance to relive our college days as we packed a few hundred people into a trolley meant to carry about 50. Our little group had bonded. I doubt we will ever be as close as we were that night.