Cheer dedication

As McKenna Daniels steps into position, it’s clear she’s not quite ready.
Her eyes widen. Her face tenses. Her body stiffens.
Kaleb Newell takes a step back and reassures her. It’s going to be just like a regular back tuck on the floor, he says. Actually, it’ll be easier, he continues, pointing out that there will be plenty of time to complete the rotation because she’ll be so high in the air.
Daniels takes a deep breath, still unsure, but ready to try. Newell places his hands on her hips, and as she jumps he launches her into the air. She performs the back tuck, Newell catches her by the hips as she completes it and Daniels is brought safely back to the mat.
One by one, fellow Jay County High School cheerleaders Breea Liette, Dara Grove and Sydnee Lee take the same position and go flipping through the air. It’s the latest step in a process that started in October as the four Patriot cheerleaders, who have been joined in recent weeks by Giannina Perod, have been learning coed partner stunts.
“We have a lot of girls who are really dedicated and want to do the other things,” said JCHS cheerleading coach Abby Champ. “They want to compete more. They want to go to the next level. And to do that they need to be more versatile.”
That’s where Newell comes in.
A cheerleader first for two years at Ball State University and for the last two with the Indianapolis Colts’ Blue Stampede, Newell has been visiting Jay County once a week for about five months to help the Patriots with their coed stunting skills.
Those skills when he began were nonexistent.
“Day one they could barely get to my hands, barely get off the ground,” said Newell, who had planned to walk on to the football team at Indiana University before getting involved in cheerleading during his senior year at Pendleton Heights High School. “Now, anything that goes wrong, they know what to do.”
By their final practice in February, Daniels, Liette, Lee and Grove were all hitting rewinds — a stunt in which the girl performs an airborne back tuck and lands it on the hands of her partner. It’s a skill Champ thought her girls might be able to achieve next year.
“We didn’t expect any of them to be at rewinds this year,” she said. “They’ve just progressed so much faster.”

The rewind is just the beginning.
As practices continue, the Patriots will continue to add more difficult elements to their stunting. Those could include a back handspring into the rewind, twisting in the air or landing the stunt on just one of Newell’s hands instead of both.
Newell’s trips to Jay County began because a group of Patriot cheerleaders expressed an interest in cheering in college. And they were willing to put in the work to prepare themselves to get there.
“I care so much about cheer and I just want to do really well and do it for the rest of my life because I’m really passionate about it,” said sophomore Breea Liette, who aspires to be a UCA coach like Newell, Champ and JCHS assistant coach Ashley Loucks. “So every time I get a chance, I take it …
“In order to … cheer in college I can’t just do what a normal teenager would. I need to go beyond that.”
In addition to the college aspirations, Champ has set a goal of expanding her squad’s competition schedule beyond the annual August trip to the Indiana State Fair. She has hopes of her squad competing in a qualifying event late this year in order to earn a berth to the UCA National Championships in February 2017 in Orlando, Florida.
Not only has the group of girls been working with Newell, but a larger group has also been traveling to Westfield a couple of times a month since October in order to work on tumbling.
All of the extra effort will have an impact when the Patriots return to the mat to begin preparing for this year’s state fair competition.
“It’s going to make them much more versatile for us,” said Champ of the coed stunting. “If they’re off at all, there aren’t two people to help them out. There’s just one person. So it has to be perfect or they have to adjust. They can’t rely on somebody else to adjust.”
That hasn’t always been easy.
The girls use the words “scary” and “horrifying” to describe their first time trying a new stunt. They’ve all had that look on their face like Daniels did on her first attempt at a rewind.
But over the weeks, a trust has developed. There’s still fear when they try something new, but they know Newell will be there to catch them.
“I feel more comfortable the more we do it,” said Lee, who has always been a base for the JCHS squad. “It’s giving us all more experience with different things and not just what we’re used to doing.”
“It’s just by practicing it more and more. You realize he’s not going to drop you,” said Grove. “You get more confident.”
It’s that confidence that they hope will take them where they want to go — to a state fair championship, a berth at nationals, a college cheerleading career.
That they’re preparing so early — Perod is a junior, Liette, Lee and Daniels are sophomores and Grove is a freshman — speaks volumes to those possibilities, said Newell.
“It’s definitely been a real joy to teach them and see how far they’ve progressed in such a short amount of time,” he said. “To take those steps, two, three, four years out … says a lot of character about their drive and determination and what they want to do.”