SLF Football-Heartland Cardinals

Pictured: Kara and team member, center: Knownhotti Aabye


Are you ready for some football? Well, I am. It's about time I updated on the status of my SFL cheer leading experiences. After quite some time with the Bengals team that never seemed to quite get off the ground with only a few players, one of our owners decided to back out leaving us to merge with the Heartland Cardinals, an established team also in need of players and cheerleaders. Journey McLaglen and Raubin Sachertorte joined forces forming what is today the Heartland Cardinals, a team with a full roster. The changes were many not only within our team but with SFL in general. The men quickly began practices and attempts to obtain more players until they signed their last few players just a couple of days prior to our first pre-season game last Saturday. The cheerleaders underwent some administrative changes, not without a bit of drama, but also pulled together with less than a week before game day a full group of eight girls for half time (up from 4 that was previously allowed) and an additional 6 on the sidelines. Rules changed and the cheer squads can now have up to 16 girls with 8 for half time and 8 for sideline at each game if desired or all are able to be present. I was very impressed that a song was picked, remixed to fit the time constraints, a routine developed and learned all within less than a week and come Saturday the team and cheerleaders felt pretty ready. I should not have had any doubts, as the boys played hard and led the game against the experienced Packers the entire game for a final score of 35 to 16. I was also impressed that so many of the men excelled in different ways. As for the cheerleaders, I was also proud of the end result with less that a week for that routine. One cheerleader crashed but had a quick recovery and found her spot, so all in all I'd say it was pretty good. I have watched several games and seen squads with crashed cheerleaders and empty spots and girls having a hard time moving to spots due to lag or some reason, so I was actually very pleased with our results and we had a lot of compliments. It's my understanding tweet.tv will be broadcasting their filming of the game and I hope they also captured us cheerleaders in that. I will post a link when/if I find it.

(Scoreboard photo courtesy of Knownhotti)

Pre-season has ended and Season games will start the beginning of December. At this point it's my understand that they are still mainly allowing only teams, special guests, and owners/players/cheerleaders of other teams in during games. After the initial game attempt at allowing anyone in and over 500 people trying to show up in the 3 sim area and the field scripts still with a few bugs, I guess they wanted to be able to be sure the games can be properly played before opening to full public again. At this point the games are fun to watch and it's very much like real football with the sportscasters announcing, the music and sounds, cheer leaders and of course the football players with their real plays actually participating live with their avatars. It's pretty impressive.

An added bonus to this team is that one of the owners has a bar called the Lonestar. Granted it's a country western bar, but they have "regular" music on Thursday nights and actually mix up the stuff other nights pretty well too with an ongoing crowd that is fun to hang around with. Above the practice stadium area and cheer leading practice field there is a platform that houses a really cool players club that includes a dance club area, Cardinals gift shop and a stadium seating theater area. We had a party Sunday night to celebrate the win Saturday and I really like that place a lot.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Heartland/153/224/22 or direct link here: LonestarHere.

Lonestar Dancing: Pagan, Kara, Kathy and Lilly