ugh...

My back spot got hurt this week. We were doing a waterfall out to the front and our top girl bailed in the middle and landed right on her right shoulder. It separated. So she hasn't been practicing this week but we really need the practice. We didn't have to tape because of it but we have to send in our old tape to try to qualify for all girl partner stunt nationals. I think the tape is good enough to qualify, but if it's not I will be disappointed....I think. It's so stressful, I don't even know if I would be that sad if we didn't do it. We'll see how this turns out. I do hope she gets better though she's a great asset to our team.

It's a start!

A lot of things started this week. First of all, we FINALLY started our routine and I'm really liking it. Second, I landed my standing tuck multiple times yesterday! I am so proud of myself, now I just have to keep it up. And third, the university's athletic department named us the most dangerous team on campus (aside from football of course). Although I am happy people are recognizing us as a sport, including the training staff who sees a lot of our injuries happen, we are not restricted more then ever. Some of the girls on our team are ACA certified, which is basically a liscense to supervise cheerleading activities. But, the athletic dept. doesn't understand that an we are no longer allowed to do any stunts without a coach there. This puts us in a hard situation because in order to practice as much as we need to, we need to do it on our own. We are trying to work it out so we can, because we need to work hard before nationals. But I am glad people are realizing how tough this competitive SPORT is. It's a start!

struggling...

Now is the time to buckle down. We are struggling to come up with money to go to nationals. We need about 18,000 to cover airfare, hotel, and everything else. We need to fundraise 8,000 of that and our coaches got the rest with the school. So far we haven't raised a lot. We are tailgating the sports games and collecting money and in return we show them a cool stunt. It works pretty well. On Tuesday we have a choreographer coming in to help us with a routine all week. Hopefully we will have the whole routine down by next weekend. We recently got two layout basket tosses and one full basket toss. We are hoping the lay outs will be fulls by next week. My top girl is too scared to do it but I hope she changes her mind. I'm at the point where I'm almost fed up with my team but after we get a routine down it should be better. I hope...

here we go...

Here we go again. It's October! Time to start working my butt off at practice. This weekend is my only weekend off until after Nationals in January. I'm going to have practice Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Saturday and Sunday, as well as attending football games and appearances. So busy! Other than that, I just found out from my coach Emily that soon NCAA will be declaring cheerleading as a sport. There have been studies done and a lot of thinking on their part but they are finally ready to say it's so. Many people don't believe how hard competitive cheerleading is. Not doing cheer, competitive cheerleading. I don't think it's going to happen while I'm here at Temple, which sucks, but at least it's being done. Since we are not a "sport" right now in Temple's eyes, we don't get any benefits like the other sports teams even though we work as hard, maybe even harder! Other then cheering football and basketball, we go to weight training twice a week, on top of practicing for nationals five times a week. And on top of that we have to do so many appearances to promote the football and basketball teams. It is so time consuming, I'm becoming so stressed. But it will all be worth it in the end.