At Cal Poly there are athletes that dedicate themselves by waking up at 6 a.m. every day.
The Cal Poly stunt team cheers on those athletes, willing their own bodies to be as graceful as those they cheer for.
With more practices and games during the week than they care to count, the team does it for one reason alone: The love of cheering.
The women aren’t on scholarship and they don’t get priority registration like the other athletes.
The team works as often as many of the official campus sports teams and shows up at most sporting events to cheer on the Mustangs — earning nothing but applause in the process.
“Cheerleading takes up a lot of your time,” said agricultural business junior Chantal Burns. “It does take away from school, so it is hard.”
The cheer season starts in May with tryouts and then moves to double-days during the summer. After that they come fresh off from 10-hour days at cheer camp to football season, which includes traveling to all the in-state away games.
“For breaks we’re here a lot of Thanksgiving and a lot of Christmas,” said liberal studies sophomore Lauren Mullarkey.
That doesn’t begin to articulate the amount of work they do for the month of November when football and basketball season overlap. After basketball season it’s all hands on deck for the national competition, including double-days all through spring break.
“You can never go home, not even on weekends,” said architecture freshman Emilee Tappen.
The fifteenth annual United Spirit Association (U.S.A.) Collegiate Cheerleading and Dance Nationals took place in Anaheim March 29 and 30, and among the competitors were some of the most prestigious cheer squads from the West Coast. The competition is made up of schools such as San Diego State and Azusa Pacific, who both have cheerleaders on scholarship. Cal Poly had a team in the all-women show cheer four-year college division and also some women double in the group stunt college division.
“This is the one really big event that we get to do,” Burns said. “Usually I don’t get nervous for competition and I think it’s just because I cared so much, because we worked so hard.”
With half the teams competing in the two-day event getting cut on the first day, the goal of a team is to survive the first day and make it to the finals. Both the cheer and stunt team passed through the first day with the stunt group posting the highest score in their division. Both teams found themselves poised to perform one last routine in the finals.
“You have one shot to perform what you have been working on all year,” said political science sophomore Kiyana Tabrizi. “It’s really nerve-wracking.”
After performing a two and half minute routine in the finals all that was left was the awards ceremony.
“They called sixth, they called fifth, they called fourth, and they hadn’t called us,” Tibrizi said. “I was really not expecting that.”
In the show cheer division the team had performed well enough to take third place, their highest finish ever. The high finish in the cheer division was accompanied by a victory in the stunt competition.
“Last year we took fourth place (in the cheer division) and our goal was to do better. They worked really hard for it,” said head coach Annette Laron-Pickett. “For stunt group they got second place (last year) and they worked really hard for the national championship, which they got.”
The goal of a national championship was on the team’s minds since the beginning of the year. “If you win you get a national championship backpack,” said nutrition senior Becky Terry. “At the end of practice we’d break (the huddle) on backpacks. It’s what we talked about every single practice.”
For each cheerleader, nationals represented the culmination of hard work and team unity.
“(My family) tells me daily to quit. Every day they ask ‘why do you do it?’” said Tabrizi. “Honestly, it’s for my girls, it’s for my team it’s for my coach.”
Despite the grueling, time-consuming schedule each team member will quickly tell you how the benefits greatly outweigh the costs. In fact the team is so close-knit that they refer to their coach as ‘grandma’ and their lone senior as ‘mom.’
“Every year I say I should probably get a job and move on with my life but I come back every year,” Burns said. “(The) memories will last forever and I’ll know that I was a part of something great throughout my college years.”