Dance, Drill, Basketball, Baseball, Soccer, Skiing, Track

The title sums up our winter. Taylor was busy with dance and drill team. Matty double dipped in basketball (playing for Liberty Select and Cougar Mountain Middle School) and baseball, and Brayden wrapped up indoor soccer and has been skiing every chance he gets. This is a busy season for our family! In between all of this, we went on our annual ski trip with the Crumpacker family to Sun Valley, ID; Matty, Tommy and I traveled to Phoenix for a baseball tourney; and I started a new job on 3/3.

Taylor is competing with two numbers in dance competitions this year. The first is a small group "jazz" piece called "Bird Box." It is a very artistic dance and I love it! The second is her contemporary duo with Josie to a song called "Hold on Tight." To date, she has only had one competition, but she has three more in April and May. In the first comp, both of her dances received "Platinum" adjudications. Her small group placed 11th out of all small groups in the comp, and her duo placed 6th. Not bad! There is a lot of talent out there!

The drill team is gearing up for the state competition next Friday in Yakima, WA. Despite this year being a rebuilding year (there are only 7-8 girls on the compete teams), they have done really well.

Competition #1, 1/18/2025: Military placed 1st, Kick placed 2nd
Competition #2: 2/1/2025: Neither dance placed
Competition #3: 2/15/2025: Military and Kick both placed 1st!
Competition #4: 3/1/2025: Neither dance placed
District Comp: 3/15/2025: Military placed 2nd (behind Mercer Island, who has 26 dancers in the military routine - it is hard to complete against that when we have only 7) and Kick placed 1st
State Comp on 3/28/2025. Stay tuned.

Matty's Liberty Select basketball team was in Spokane last weekend for the Washington State Boys Basketball Championship. The team played in the silver bracket and went 2-2 over the weekend. The team did not have a lot of depth on the bench this year, so Matty, Lucas Park, JJ Hwang and Clayton Bogh carried the team.

Matty's CMMS basketball team is not very good. Matty is, by far, the strongest player on the team. It gives him a chance to shine on the court, but he could really use some help out there. The team has lost every game but one (there are two games left in the season). In one game against Issaquah Middle School, they lost by 51 points! Matty is very strong defensively but is not the best shooter. Don't get me wrong, he scores a lot of points on this team, but he is not a big guy and has trouble getting past the big opponents as they block him.

I don't have any pictures of Matty playing for CMMS, but here is a picture of his cheer squad when Scott and Mandy were in town.

Baseball season is ramping up. Matty's team (Elevate Jackson 14U) played in a tournament in Palm Springs, CA in January and Mesa, AZ in March. His team did not make it to the championship game in either tourney (a contrast to last year when they won almost every tourney), but we have a lot of baseball ahead of us.

Mimi and Baba made it to a couple of games. Precious!

Matty's buddies, the Walla Walla Sweets 13U team, was at the same tourney.

Brayden played indoor soccer from late November through January. He is showing more and more interest in the sport. While he is not the star player, he is becoming more aggressive, and he loves running up and down the pitch. His fall rec team did really well in their league (they were almost undefeated and made it to the rec championship bracket), and most of the boys from the rec team play indoor soccer together. It has been a great experience for Brayden. He says he wants to try out for a select soccer team (tryouts are in May), so we'll see. 

This is B's fall 2024 rec soccer team. I am not sure I posted these pictures last year.

B continues to LOVE skiing. He's obsessed. When we went to Sun Valley for mid-winter break, Brayden studied the trail maps and had plans in his head before we ever started skiing. On the first day, as we were driving to the mountain, Brayden was driving us all crazy, telling us which lift we needed to take and where we needed to ski from there. When he suggested we start with a black run, Taylor told Brayden she did not want to start on a black, and Brayden said, "It's okay; it is not a difficult black one." We all laughed because B had never been to the mountain! He was pulling all of this knowledge from YouTube videos of Sun Valley. Thankfully, Brayden has been skiing a couple of times at Snoqualmie with friends on the weekend. It is his true love, and I need to figure out a way to get him on a ski bus next year!

It's hard to find pictures of Brayden skiing because he is always ahead of me! He is in this group picture somewhere. :)

Next up for Brayden is middle school track, which starts in a week.