Makeup done, hair up, costume on, the Niles West Pommers are about to hit the stage to perform their next routine.  This past weekend, Saturday, Dec., 15, the Niles West Poms team performed at Stagg High School for an  IHSA invite.

After placing for nationals over the summer, the poms team has worked and practiced on their dances every week for three days a week. The poms team has utilized competitions to practice their routines and perfect them for nationals.

“We have three IHSA competitions that we are performing in to get us ready for nationals. We are basically using these competitions as practice. We’ve been working on these routines for a while now, learning choreographing and formations and cleaning the routine,” senior Nirvana Meseljevic said. Basically, once the season begins, we start preparing for competition and making sure we go in knowing what to expect because this is our first year going to nationals in a while, and it’s really exciting for the team and coaches as a whole.”

At the competition, poms performed two dances: one lyrical dance and a traditional poms routine.

“The lyrical dance we’re doing is really intricate and powerful at the same time and it’s not the kind of dances you see us do at games and pep assemblies, whereas the Pom routine we’re doing is a lot more hard hitting fast movements that were used to. But we always take one lyrical and one Pom routine when we go to competitions because those are our strongest categories,” Meseljevic said.

The hard work the team has put into their dances was demonstrated at the competition.

“Our musicality and our synchronization would probably be what we are good at as a team. I think it showed when we performed Saturday,” senior Luciana Tena said.

The poms team was optimistic about this weekend’s competition. This competition provided them with the feedback they need to improve and tweak their routines for nationals.

“This competition helped us see what we have to improve for nationals, but overall we got good feedback on our dances,” captain and junior Salma Abu-Taleb, said.