For members of the Neosho High School cheerleading squad, most of the last cheer season has been focused around getting to the Auto Zone Liberty Bowl.
There have been the games and the practices and all their standard activities, but in addition to that, they have been running fundraisers since summer.
In late May, cheer coach Angela McCauley found out her team had been nominated for the honor. In mid-June, the school board cleared them for the trip and in July, they started a series of fundraising activities. They had a dunk tank at the fair, washed windows, sold brown bag lunches, poinsettias and mums, raising more than $12,000 toward the trip. Each girl invested about 100 hours in fundraising activities to go on the trip, McCauley said, and the parents helped keep everything organized from bookkeeping to staffing the different events.
“Without my parents we wouldn’t have made it,” she said. “They did a great job.”
Finally, in late December, the choreography they needed arrived and cheerleaders Meghan Forkner, Brooke Henry, Jordan Hern, Kelsi Johnson, Stephanie Miller, Taylor Mitchell, Morgan Peoples, Ashlee Smith, Lizzy Snyder, Paige Snyder and Alexis Williams spent Christmas break learning the routine they would perform.
“We spent close to 10 hours together as a team,” McCauley said.
Team members doubled that in the time spent practicing at each other’s houses. The girls cheered for the first two days of the Neosho Holiday Tournament and Wednesday morning, they loaded into a caravan of cars and headed for Memphis.
All of the practice and all of the fundraising paid off when they assembled for practice the next morning.
The cheer squads lined up for practice and choreographer Lori Lee Mendieta watched as they went through the steps and stunts. Because of their performance, Neosho was placed between the 50 and 45 yard lines right in front of the stage.
“It was a compliment for them,” McAuley said. “It became apparent they knew it [the choreography] extremely well.”
About 1,000 students, most of them in bands, participated in the event. There were 172 cheerleaders from schools around the country.
The whole experience has helped build team spirit, McCauley said, but also demonstrates their ability to cooperate.
“It helps with the team bonding where you have to get together and ‘We went to the Liberty Bowl and we’re a team,’” she said. “But they had to learn to mesh and blend with other schools and became a part of a larger team.”
