Submitted photo – The Dream Athletics girls in Florida over the weekend.

A cheer team from the Dream Athletics gym in Humboldt County placed fourth at the All-Star World Championships in Orlando, Florida, over the weekend.

The Junior 2 Motley Crue, made up mostly of girls from Eureka, Fortuna and McKinleyville, exceeded their expectations with an outstanding performance at their biggest tournament yet.

Competing in a bracket of 119 teams in the J2 division, the local girls advanced to the finals, which featured the top 40 teams.

They then turned in an errorless performance on their way to a fourth-place finish.

“It was pretty awesome,” team coach Hakim Wyllie said. “It was quite an accomplishment.”

Dream Athletics, which has around 70-80 girls, is a Division-II gym for competitive cheer, but they beat out multiple Division-I teams (125 competitors or more) on their way to the impressive finish.

“We were up there with the top teams in the world,” Wyllie said. “And for a small gym like ours it was pretty awesome.”

The Dream Athletics girls scored 96.8 points in the finals, just one-tenth of a point out of third place.

The bracket was won by a team from England.

The local girls received a fully-paid bid to the world championships after an impressive showing at a recent tournament in Reno and only had to pay travel expenses.

Dream Athletics, which will celebrate its ninth anniversary next month, has three competitive elite teams — a Youth team, a Junior team and a Senior team.

Submitted photo

The Junior team was the only one to travel for the prestigious event, which Wyllie described as “our biggest competition to date.”

The local gym, which is based in Samoa, travels to about five or six tournaments a year.