Courtesy of Emily O’Connor

Senior Emily O’Connor poses in her navy and gold cheer uniform at the ICE All-Stars competition. For years, O’Connor looked up to the ICE athletes. “I feel lucky to be able to take the mat with ICE across my chest. The owner has built such a well-oiled machine, and the coaches at ICE have helped me become a better person by their life lessons and examples.”

Fixing her high tight ponytail and wiping the sweat from her face, senior Emily O’Connor lightens the mood at practice with a cheesy joke as her team, ICE All-Stars Aftershock, perfects their routine before a competition.

“I try to be a leader and rally everyone together. [It] has helped me overcome losing momentum because I see other people doing it. I see them trying to pick people up, and I’m like, ‘oh, that probably feels good to do’ and help people. So I want to do that, too,” O’Connor said.

One of the ways O’Connor enjoys leading is by forming relationships with younger athletes from her gym. 

“I’m on level 16, and, at our gym, we have the little level one team that always practices before us. There are these two little girls, and every practice, they always come up and hug me and I tell them ‘Oh my gosh you did so good!’ It’s rewarding to see people looking up to you in general and it’s such a great feeling,” O’Connor said.

Supporting younger cheerleaders reminds O’Connor of her first-ever cheer team.

“The team was about 30 girls and at the beginning. I felt kind of lost, but then whenever someone would come up to me and be like, ‘Oh, my gosh, that was good, you should try doing this, I think you could do this skill,’ that was when I was like, ‘Wow, these people are seeing me and there seeing my potential,’ which is cool and rewarding,” O’Connor said.

Not only has cheer helped her increase her leadership skills, but she believes it has also helped her form great friendships.

“The best part about cheer is the people you meet. I still have friends I met in 2013. I’ve been cheering for almost 10 years. Those people are my lifelong friends. I wouldn’t trade those people for anything,” O’Connor said.

O’Connor values the support of her friends and the memories she made with them. She reflects on Worlds, a large cheer competition in Orlando, Fla., as one of the highlights of her career.

“Worlds 2019 is [my favorite cheer memory], [it] is the big competition at the end of the season. One of my teammates and I are huge cheer nerds, and we were running around the entire competition and trying to watch all the good teams who weren’t in our division. We ran around for three hours, and we were freaking out over all the teams. It was so much fun. I remember looking at my phone as I was going to bed, and it was like 20,000 steps running around Disney World,” O’Connor said.

O’Connor takes every chance she can get to watch high-level cheer teams, and one event stands out in her mind.

 “We were at a huge competition called the NCAA, and 1000s of teams went there. We were in the warm-up room with Smoed. I was so excited to see them, and it was such a cool experience,” O’Connor said.

Smoed is a high-level cheer team, but it goes much deeper for O’Connor, who was inspired to start cheering after watching a show that followed the famous California All-Stars Smoed team.

“I was just scrolling through YouTube one day. There used to be a show called ‘Cheerleaders’ that followed one of the best teams in the country, California All-stars Smoed. At the time, I was doing gymnastics, but I was kind of sick of [the] beam and bars and only liked the floor and vault events. So my mom looked into it, and we found a gym five minutes from my house,” O’Connor said.

In a sport filled with stereotypes, O’Connor appreciates how the show portrays the reality of cheer. 

“I think it’s important to have those kinds of shows, even if it is pretty raw, because they make people see cheer for how it is and not the glitz and glam everyone thinks it is. It gets intense. Sometimes you want to quit, and there are those tiny little moments of practice when you question even being there,” O’Connor said.

Despite the struggles, O’Connor believes it is worth it. 

“It’s kind of like, ‘why am I even trying to do this again, it’s so hard.’ But then there’s moments where you realize why you’re in the sport and why you do what you do,” O’Connor said.