In 5th grade I tried out to be a cheerleader. I went to a small, and I mean SMALL country grade school. There were 19 in my class (or was it 22? It was a long time ago and I don’t really remember much of my childhood)
I was soooooo awkward, uncomfortable and very shy. I looked the equivalent of a praying mantis, all arms and legs with a weird head and long torso. I even sported this unmanageable piece of what we’ll call a bang that would curl at the base and stick up straight at the top that could be classified as an antennae to fully complete the arthropodic look . Now, imagine that insect doing a cheer…..welcome to my 5th grade cheerleading tryouts.
The tryouts were humiliating and we had to do the routine in a gym full of our peers, aka the competition, the judges, aka The Cheer Moms, other people’s families and whoever else wanted a good laugh. I don’t remember all the gory details but I’m pretty sure I had to do some sort of cheer-off and re-do the routine so the judges could decide between a friend and I. I began to get that sinking feeling that I probably wasn’t going to fulfill my destiny of wearing bloomers.
I’m not good at math but stay with me here. If there were 19 in my class and roughly half were girls and maybe only half of those tried out for cheer and you combine those with the handful of 6th graders who were also included as the B team “squad”, one would think that I’d have a pretty good chance of making the team. Except, I didn’t make it. I was crushed and as I cried and waited for my Mom to pick me up in her phone company bucket truck, I honestly thought that life couldn’t get any worse. Then I realized that I had to go back to school the next day and hear my friends talk about how they made it and then sit through the whole basketball season and see them come to school in their cheer uniforms on game days.
A star is born:
A couple weeks into the season, my Mom and I were at an Estee Lauder counter at the mall (she was all in on a particular shade of lipstick) and we randomly ran in to one of the cheer coaches and she said that she had been meaning to call me and that she would like for me to be an alternate on the cheer team. I didn’t know what that meant but soon found out it was like a glorified manager for cheerleaders, but I would actually get to cheer, jackpot. I felt excited, depressed, embarrassed, nervous and a sense of redemption all at once. Wait, did I get to wear bloomers and those sweet shoes that had interchangeable color areas?! This was MY moment. Anyway I put on that ugly blue and gold uniform and cheered my heart out for the Milton Pope Pilot boys basketball team the rest of that year and the 3 years after that and man did I suck at it-see states below.
Favorite Cheer: A-W-E-S-O-M-E, awesome, awesome, TO-TO-TALLY.
Favorite jump: I couldn’t really do them but I really liked to say the word Herkie.
Favorite acrobatic trick: no.
Flexibility on a scale of 1-10: negative 17.
Maybe Volleyball was more my thing? Actually no, not really but at least there weren’t tryouts and apparently we won a trophy. GOOOOO Pilots!
mpoweredstate 