I always hated our first practices. Practices always started mid July or even earlier sometimes. The weather was always hot and clammy, especially after practicing for hours. The sport, cheerleading. Cheerleading is not as easy as it looks. There's much more to cheerleading than cheering for football or basketball players while they sweat and shoot baskets or make touchdowns. Cheerleaders sweat too, I can remember the first year I started cheering. That year, I think all the girls on my team had sweat coming down all season long.

It all goes back to 1997, when I was in the 7th grade I decided to take up cheerleading. Before I started, I thought it was going to be all fun and games. What could be easier than going out to a football field and cheering for a bunch of sweaty guys? I remember being so excited to start that I couldn't wait till July for practice; it came sooner than I thought. First day of practice, I had my spandex shorts on, my extremely oversized shirt on, and my frozen water that was almost burning my fingertips. I got to the empty field; there were so many girls there. All different types of girls tall ones, short ones, and skinny ones t

was staring at us. Time passed and we were finally next. We were all so nervous; we said a prayer and whispered the lyrics to "Footloose" to hopefully calm our nerves. The announcer called our name and we walked out onto the floor. I've never been so nervous in my life, people screaming our name out and screaming "GO". We began with our dance, I think our fans noticed we were a little nervous, that they started to sing along with our song. I heard all the fans singing "Every cut everybody cut, footloose", it was awesome. After that, we stole the show; we hit all our stunts, moves, and smiles. After we were done, we ran off the stage and as soon as we got off every one of us started to cry. They weren't sad tears, they were happy tears. Our coaches yelling "You did it girls, you did it", they were crying too. When they were announcing the winners, they announced us first place. We were all so excited and surprised, we didn't know what to do. We were #1, it felt good. That season were ended up being number one in California, and moved onto nationals in Florida. We didn't win in nationals, because our coaches say it's a "political" thing, whatever that means. It was all worth it though, we were number one in our hearts and back in California.

I thought competition was only for college cheerleaders and we were nowhere near being as good as them. Our coaches handed out a paper with our competition cheer typed on it; they told us we needed to memorize it. I thought to myself I could never memorize this plus a dance. For a week straight we only worked on our cheer, we weren't good at all. Our coaches had no faith in us. They always used to tell us "You girls aren't going anywhere looking like this". I don't think it was to motivate us to be better because we really sucked. We weren't together, our claps were off, we couldn't get our jumps at the same time and we definitely couldn't get our stunts up. Soon they started to teach us the moves of the competition dance but they didn't teach us with our music just with eight counts. As time passed and competition got closer we started to show some improvement. At this time our coaches decided to finally let us hear our dance song.

Letty and Ashley had been doing this since there w

Some common words found in the essay are:
FIGHT WIN, Footloose Due, , Letty Ashley, girls team, players sweat, soon started, song footloose, letty ashley, cheerleaders sweat, cheerleading cheering, started practice, song motivated, coaches' house,
Approximate Word count = 1509
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)