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.

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.