All-Star Please Help Me....ugh!

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Maybe you might get some feedback. Also, Do you practice the exact same warm up everytime? For example, our kids no matter what the warm up room looks like , do the same warm up pretty much at each comp. That gives them a sense of security and they are comfortable knowing what happens next. Also, do the kids watch their competitors in the warm up room or prior to entering? If so that could be rattling them. Maybe try a scavenger hunt or team bonding outside to keep them together and out of the venue!

This is so true and I recommend it to anyone trying to deal with anxious kids. I'm 21 and I still get competition anxiety, to the point that I threw up in warm ups at UCA College Nationals this year. It's no where near as bad as it used to be though because my team has a specific warm-up routine that we begin to follow the first practice that we run the routine full out. It's calming to know exactly how much time you have to warm everything up and where you are going to go next.
 
I have been observing this very same behavior at our gym, the kids seem just too young to be experiencing this level of anxiety/crying/blocks that have been recently circulating. Huge cause of concern for me, as it seems to be almost an epidemic. My concern is it's putting lots of attention on the affected kids and taking valuable time away from practice for the rest of the team. Not sure how to proceed with this, its not my child that is exhibiting these behaviors. Very frustrating!
 
Sorry I didn't see the age of the cheerleaders in question but I have friends with kids in programs where there have been outbreaks of everything from anxiety to tumbling blocks. Sometimes kids do feed off one another's emotions but other times they just see what gets attention and then mimic that to get attention too. . .

I was going to write something very similar. Not to say some of the kids don't have anxiety problems, because they are very real (i have experienced personally), but if one or two kids start getting a lot of attention for it, the rest sometimes feel like they need to do that as well. I remember mental block epidemics on our youth teams... :banghead:.
Whenever I coached we were really strict about attitude. one person rolling their eyes meant the whole team was running. This worked really well for us because even though one person was getting attention, the whole team faced consequences for it. no one wanted to be "that girl" that made the team do extra conditioning. i know they hated us sometimes for it, but they weren't complaining when they hit at every competition.
 
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