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Welcome to My Page
Created By: Rita Whitman
I am
a student at the
Minor
Essay 1:
Shattered
Dreams
“
P-C-C-HS, Red, Black, White Oh Yes!” we cheered as we practiced our routine for
the National Cheerleading Competition in Orlando, Fl. Cheerleading was more
than just fun to us, it was a job, like
it is to most who are on a competitive squad. Three hour practices six days a
week, a gymnastics class, cheering games and still attending school was a hard
schedule to juggle, but we all made sacrifices to be the best squad. It was my
senior year
and this was the best squad I had been on in my four years of cheerleading at Perry Central. I knew we were talented and
everyone on the squad had high hopes and aspirations for the upcoming year, one being to make it to the finals at Nationals.
This would be a great feat to achieve and if we could pull it off it would be a fairytale end to my senior year. Some people might
say that I wanted to go out with a bang and this seemed an appropriate way to end my cheerleading career. Little did we know
that on this day those hopes and dreams of even competing at Nationals could jeopardy.
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As usual we were practicing our routine, after three or four times of doing our 2 ½ minute routine full out when I noticed that one of my fellow teammates, Leslie, was hurt. While taking a break I asked her what had happened as I overheard her complaining of the pain in her hand. During our toe-touch back handspring sequence she had landed wrong on her hand. Leslie being the true competitor that she is continued on with the routine as if nothing had happened, probably only adding to the severity of her injury. “I am just going to continue with practice, it doesn’t hurt that bad,” she said. But somehow I knew she was lying, she was just afraid to tell our coach. Nationals were only a week away and an injury could devastate the squad’s ability to compete in the competition. Our coach was the type who pushed us to be all that we could be, she didn’t tolerate complaining of injuries, if we got hurt she would tell us to suck it up and go on. A lot of injuries were not talked about, we all put the team ahead of our own well being, and no matter the pain we always pushed ourselves. Leslie and I both continued practice not even mentioning her possible injury.
The next day we had a fundraiser, as soon as I saw Leslie I asked her about her hand. “Here let me show you,” she said as she turned over hand to give me a peak. Her hand was swelled and bruised from her knuckles down into the palm of her hand. Again I asked her if she told Miss Chaney yet. “Yeah, she told me it would be best if I went and got it x-rayed just to make sure. But she thinks it is just a sprain and I will still be able to compete.” As bad as I wanted to believe that, I feared for the worst.
“Ring Ring,”
growled the phone at
“I can’t compete, my hand is broken
in three places and I have to go tomorrow and get a cast put on it,” she
sobbed. “I tried calling Miss Chaney but she wasn’t home.” I desperately tried
to calm Leslie down and reassure her that everything would be okay, but in the
back of my mind I wanted to break down and cry. I realized that all my hopes
for my senior year had been shattered with this news. 
I called our assistant
coach and told her what Leslie had told me and she said we would talk about it
at practice tomorrow. Before we got off the phone she told me to
call all the girls and tell them to be ready to work when they came to practice
tomorrow. As I called all the girls and told them the news, they all seemed
as devastated as I was to hear about Leslie. We all just had to wait till
tomorrow to hear what Miss Chaney had to say about the
sudden situation.
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When
I walked in the gym the next day I was ready for a hard practice, but I could
see the fear in my teammate’s eyes and I knew that I had to do something to
motivate the team. Being a senior and sort of a designated leader I huddled the
squad together for a pep talk. I told them that we had come too far and had too
much talent to let one injury get in the way of our goal. “It wont be easy I
will admit, but I think we can do it and we owe it to ourselves to try,” I went
on. Everyone agreed, we had a big group hug and started to rework the routine
without Leslie. Leslie played a huge role in the routine; she was a main base
in almost all the stunt sequences. The first order of the day was to find
someone who was strong enough to do the mounts and then teach them the
difficult stunts that took bases such as Leslie since summer to master. That is
where Leah came into play and she took Leslie’s role in the routine willingly.
I am not going to say that the stunts hit the first time we tried them or the
routine was flawless when we tires it, but we were determined to make it work.
In only a few hours Leah learned the stunts and had them pretty well mastered by the end of practice. This was
an obstacle but we were overcoming it as a team, sometimes the hard times make you stronger and I truly believe
it brought our team closer together, not only as a squad but as a family. We continued in our stride to master the
newly altered routine, including Leslie, cast and all. She was a part of the team and it was a dream of hers to
compete at Nationals and we didn’t want to deny her that, anyways she is great at getting the crowd involved
and she can work a sign and megaphone.
We were finally in
fun but make my school, team and myself proud. The night before Preliminaries we rolled our hair, turd curls we
called them, and got into bed early because we had a early and busy day approaching. Morning came a little to
fast I can remember rushing to get ready and grabbing a quick bit to eat before running to catch the shuttle to http://www.lakedwoodgym.com/resized- edited/cheerleading-practice.jp MGM Studios for the competition. We went backstage the Indiana Jones set, in MGM, and stretched, tumbled and warmed up our stunts. Sitting backstage watching all the well known squads such as Houston, Germantown and Greenup warm up scared me a little, because they we really good. I mean, I watched these teams on ESPN every year and now competing against them, it would make anyone nervous. I mean we were all so nervous we opted not to watch anyone perform because we really didn’t want to know what the competition looked like; we didn’t want to get cold feet. But I believed in my squad, so we anxiously waited for them to call our names, so we could show everyone what we were made of. Our name was finally called to enter onto the competition mat, I remember hearing everyone screaming our names, they had faith in us and all we wanted to do was make them proud. I put a huge smile on my face and
prayed, at least we were here. Most squads who would have had to endure what we had been through in the past week would have just given up. But not
us, we bonded, regrouped and now we were here to get the job done.