Beginners

By Gabby Uy, Year 11

"Five, six, seven, eight!"

Numbers were hollered countless times as the BSM Cheer team held its first ever open training session last Friday afternoon. With nerve, laughter and nervous laughter, ten honorary cheerleaders danced and stunted along with the squad, flooding the sports hall with noise and enthusiasm. A first straddle jump, a first stunt, a first split-related cramp - the day was one of many beginnings, and we’re thrilled to say that a few girls left excited to sign up for varsity. But as the team looks forward to another year of growth, we can’t help but look back with a touch of nostalgia.

We aren’t the biggest sport here at BSM and we certainly aren’t the oldest. Like everyone else, I was thoroughly, spectacularly clueless when I first joined the squad as a flyer in January. I was aware of the consequences in a vague, abstract sense - according to the Internet, a flyer is “a person or thing that flies” - but I didn’t know much beyond that. I had never even seen Bring It On.

I was terrified.

See, cheer shouldn't exist. We shouldn't be standing on teetering wrists held at eye-level. We shouldn’t be tossing hundred-pound girls in the air or catching them with fingers, elbows and the occasional inch-thick mat. Essentially, we have one (surprisingly effective) health and safety rule: “if anyone starts falling, give them a bear hug.” This is ridiculous. This should be impossible.

This is freaking awesome.

There’s something oddly liberating about throwing yourself into something head first without any expectations or reservations. Cheer has pushed our team to its limits - and I’m proud to say that we’ve pushed right back. With every passing week, our jumps get higher, our stunts get cleaner and we inch closer and closer to what should be unachievable. Euphoria radiates from our tiny corner of the hall, sending me home exhausted yet electric with the adrenaline still clinging to the sweat on my skin.

But I read something interesting the other day: apparently, it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. If my calculator works, that’s over a tenth of the approximately 87,600 hours I’ve been awake for so far. That’s a lot of hours! On days when stunts topple over and we stumble home disheartened, such figures can humble me into a state of quiet internal panic. We barely have 2000 hours between us (I counted) and it’s easy to feel like that isn’t enough. I know overgeneralized theories can’t possibly be accurate. I know I shouldn’t be so impatient. Still, it worries me.

After all, whether you cheer or you don’t, there’s this creeping sentiment I often sense sitting on the backburner of our collective subconscious. It simmers away as the calendar turns to August and we blearily, begrudgingly pull on white shirts and blue ties. As September rolls around and a dizzying array of ASA options come flooding in, yet we carefully select last year’s handful.

It’s this universal, inexplicable fear of beginnings. Somewhere in between years seven and thirteen, the idea of a fresh start becomes frightening instead of reassuring: we begin to feel that we’re somehow behind, too old, too late to venture into the unfamiliar, to audition for that musical or try out for that sports team. That others are somehow ahead in their academic endeavors, athletic pursuits, relationships, college applications and lives in general, and starting from scratch is a waste of the little time we have left. So we settle. We stop stretching.

Alone on my laptop, binge-watching NCC videos late into the night, such thoughts can scare me more than any stunt, dance or tumble ever will. Ultimately, BSM Cheer is an amalgam of many beginnings and there will only be more of them as the new year approaches. The mere idea of the steep climb ahead is exhilarating at times and nauseating at others.

But I think we can make it. In the past year alone, we’ve conquered so many firsts: our first basket toss. Our first varsity team. Our first fractured ankle. And if there’s one thing I know for certain, it’s that nothing begins more beginnings than catching a person from a ten foot high trust fall - except being squashed by that person, together. Our collective cluelessness is as comforting as it is worrying: nobody has nailed both their heel stretches yet. Nobody is completely unafraid of walkovers. We laugh and we sweat through pain and uncertainty, warmed by the breathless enthusiasm reflected back at and around us.

I’ve been searching for a word to describe this phenomenon. Some call it “spirit”, but spirit can’t launch girls ten feet in the air. Spirit can’t sustain bruises for others. Spirit can’t literally dive, terrified, into something the school has never seen before. No, the determination that binds us is a powerful, unbridled energy. It’s more than just trust and it’s more than just passion. It’s through cheer that I’ve found fire, steel, sunlight and grit: in myself, in the people surrounding me and above all in the wonders we work as a team. We can’t afford to lose this stubborn idealism; this indefinable sense of togetherness - at the end of the day, it’s all we have.

Coach Mavy, Coach Mark, Coach Kaycee and Coach Dico - thanks for believing in and catching us no matter what. We know we’ll make you proud one day.

Riana, Nikki, Nikki, Ella, Ella, Chloe, Darra, Min and Audrey - I’m so incredibly honoured, scared, humbled and thrilled to be stuck in this bittersweet beginning with you guys. But above all, I’m hopeful: I want more impossibles for us. I want little impossibles. I want enormous impossibles! Maybe we’ll fall. (We’ll probably fall.) But if next year is anything like this one, no way in hell can we possibly fail.

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