Thursday Thirteen #4 Cheer Stuff

Thirteen Things about how I became a Cheer Coach

1. My Oldest daughter, who was 12 at the time was interested in cheerleading. She was fascinated with competitive cheer, their routines and their stunts.

2. I started looking into competitve cheer organizations locally and found the all star teams to be a bit pricey. I still continued to look. Someone finally led me to pop warner.

3. My daughter and I attended one of their meetings during their open registration. There were quite a few people there. They notified us that the age group that we were interested in did not have a coach and that they wouldn't have a Pee Wee squad that year if no one volunteered.

4. No, I did not raise my hand voluntarily. I looked around the room and saw other moms who were starting to raise their hand, but their daughters sitting right next to them grabbed their mom's hand and brought it back down. It happened to a few moms.

5. I looked at my daughter and said I know nothing about cheer and she said "that's okay, they send you to workshops to learn." I told her.....I don't think so.

6. By the end of the night, no one had raised their hand and they were about to end the meeting. They called out one last time for volunteers and my daughter right next to me, raised my hand and she said PLEASE! I saw in her eyes that she really wanted to do this so I said what the heck.

7. After I raised my hand, four more did and we had an instant coaching staff ( who knew nothing about the sport) Pretty scary, huh? This particular Pop Warner group had a reputation of placing in the top 3 of all their competitions. How were we going to do that?

8. To make the long story short, that first year that I coached we had 3 competitions. We placed 3rd, 2nd and 1st. It was a lot of hard work, but well worth it.

9. Second year of cheer came around and my second daughter joined the team. I told my daughters I would not be able to be on the coaching staff because of the time factor. They were pretty bummed about it and everyday until the girl's first meeting they asked me if I changed my mind. NOPE!! At the meeting, the coaching staff welcomed all the new and returning cheerleaders and my girls did not look happy at all. Gosh Darnit, they really wanted me to coach. It got me thinking......... sooner or later, there will come a time where they might not want me around at all so I might as well do it while they still want me around. Coaching a cheer team takes an enormous amount of time. They practice everyday in the summer for 2 hours and when school starts it goes down to 3 days. So yes, I coached that year as well. In all our competitions, we placed 1st or 2nd.

10. Third year of cheer(this year).....my oldest daughter had to have knee surgery so she took a break. And yes, I'm on the coaching staff this year. This season we have been undefeated and we have one more competion to go. It's the Nationals in Vegas which will be held this weekend. The team took first place last year so we're returning to hold on to our title.

11. I've had a great time with my girls, but am so glad this will be our last year. My oldest daughter will be on the high school cheer team in the fall and my second daughter decided she wanted to go back to soccer and then try basketball.

12. I have learned a lot about cheer this past 3 years. When I was in high school it was just 'rah, rah, go team, go' But cheer is really a sport. It takes blood, sweat and tears to put together and pull of a great routine.