For more info...

Because I'm in the middle of learning a routine for nationals (which is in January), and practicing for it all the time I will probably talk about it more and more. To help you understand it a little better, I will post a link at the bottom to a site that you can watch videos on. These videos are from last years nationals. You can watch teams compete and see how challenging it is to get through a routine without falling or messing up because it really is a team sport. If one person messes up a whole group messes up. Everyone plays a major part. For education purposes this site is more then worthy. I use it myself if I want new ideas on stunts, or to see what is popular in routines at the moment. If I want to see how a team performs a stunt I can watch them and try to figure out how we can execute it as well. Some good teams to watch are Slippery Rock, Louisville, San Diego, Hawaii Pacific, and basically any team from the south is good.

http://varsitywired.com/
When you go here you want to click competitions and then videos. Scroll down and go to UCA/UDA. This is the competition we go to.

You will never know...

So I named this blog "not just spirit" because I will be blogging about cheerleading, and most people out there think of it as doing froo froo little cheers at games. For those of you who have never been to a competitive cheerleading event, it is not just doing cheers. We do flips and throw girls high in the air and catch them...it's quite dangerous. There are so many injuries in cheerleading these days. In my almost 3 years at temple I've severly sprained my ankle twice, and sprained my lower back and was sitting out for 3 months. Still sometimes hurts after over a year. In fact, I don't even like cheering for the sports team all that much. I'm all about competition. Here at Temple University, we do cheer basketball and football games, but most of the time we are practicing for nationals. This week we started learning things that we will be performing and taping to send into UCA to try to get a bid for nationals. We really need that bid because Temple Athletics gives us no help in expenses to travel to Florida to Nationals. That's a whole other story. In the tape we send we need to film us doing standing back tucks, running tumbling, and then six different kinds of stunts with different dismounts for each. We also need to show some of our 2 high pyramids like 2-2-1's and what not. So far, so good. We'll see what next week brings.