Cheers of “De-fense! De-fense!” can be heard from under the football stadium’s Friday night lights.
But the side people aren’t always aware of is the physically demanding practices and high expectations put on the team members during competition season.
Getting new coaches this year has been a change for the team after the former Nixa High School varsity coaches retired at the end of last year.
“I can definitely say last year was a hard year for Nixa cheer,” assistant coach Caina Dismang said. “But we have done our absolute best this year and this season to turn it around and everything.”
Cheer has been dominated by female athletes over the last few decades. As the years have progressed, many high school and college cheer teams have encouraged male students to join.
Male students can earn scholarships by being a part of their school’s cheer team.
“I don’t think a lot of the boys realize that you can get a cheer scholarship,” Dismang said. “Because colleges are always looking for male athletes.”
Cheerleader sophomore Lilly Sellenriek said, contrary to popular belief, cheer can be difficult.
“I would say [cheer is] pretty physically demanding,” Sellenriek said. “You get really sore from all the practices. You can get hurt really easily. It’s a lot of hard work on your body.”
A common assumption about cheer is that it is always the same, whether it’s at football games, or at competitions.
“Competitive cheer – there’s a lot more hours and work that goes into it,” Sellenriek said. “You just have to repetitively do the routine over and over and over to get it perfect.”
Sophomore Gabrielle Bohlke said from her experience competitive cheer tends to be more demanding.
“With competitive cheer, you have like six or seven competitions,” Bohlke said. “Versus school cheer, you have only about three.”
Having gone through a lot of new changes last year, Sellenriek said that the team has continued to improve.
“Everybody gets along a lot better than last year. It’s a lot more focused on cheer instead of just having fun,” Bohlke said. “We’ve had some changes with coaching, but we adjusted better this year.”
Some of the cheerleaders have noticed that the team is improving quicker this year than in previous years.
“We are more put together and we’ve made more progress than we did last year,” Sellenriek said.
As of now, there is still more work ahead for Nixa cheerleaders this year, including preparing for State.
“Since me and coach Shelby have taken over, we see great changes coming,” Dismang said. “We plan on competing next weekend at our first regionals, and are hoping to bring in a first place win and then competing at state in November and also bringing a first place win.”