Bonita Vista High School’s women’s choir Sound Unlimited ended their year as Southern California Champions, beating out elite competition in the Southern California Show Choir Invitational hosted at the San Diego Convention Center last month.
The championship 16-minute set called “Sweet” featured Sound Unlimited singing about candy, as the premise was about a girl getting asked out on a date but eventually getting stood up, only to find her singing to lollipops.
Not only did the all women’s show choir win the championship, the high school girls also swept the competition, also winning best musicianship and showmanship.
The first-place finishes meant a lot to senior Melissa Wildasin,18, who in her three years in Sound Unlimited reached the first place threshold, although she said it was truly a team effort.
“It was awesome, it was great personally, but was more happy for the group. I felt like they won it for me,” she said.
“It’s just like one of those moments were you feel like all your hard work has paid off, and I feel like all the work that all the girls put in and I had put in had paid off.”
The group of about 40-girls remained competitive in the four other competitions placing in second or third but being champions on the last competition capped of her senior year, she said.
“I think we all see it as the biggest competition of the year so we know it’s our last time to make our mark competitively,” she said.
Wildasin said this year’s Sound Unlimited team had been different than those in the year’s past because this team was younger than previous teams as it mainly consisted of freshmen and underclassmen.
Wildasin said having a team full of freshmen lead to many of the girls being inexperienced so they had to learn quickly.
Despite the inexperience, Wildasin, the assistant director of Sound Unlimited and one of the only seniors in the group, said she knew right when she stepped on the stage that Sound Unlimited was going to win their last competition of the year.
“When you’re onstage together with all these girls that you worked so hard with, you can feel the energy. You know the performance is going to be good,” she said.
For Wildasin, Sound Unlimited has been a memorable high school experience that started with her not making into the group the first three times she auditioned.
But her hard work and determination made her the assistant leader in her senior year. Then in her senior year she quickly rose to be an assistant leader.
“They took a chance on me,” Wildasin said. “And I just told myself if I could work as hard as I could then I could get somewhere.”
