St. Catherine of Siena Academy Cheerleading Celebrates a Successful First Season

The St. Catherine of Siena Academy in Wixom had its first cheerleading season this year. Team members included three girls from Novi, Angela Mascari, Danielle Mersch, and Isabelle Brumley, as well as Cecilia Orlowski, Erika Standhart, Erin Gries, Sabrina Sherman, Lauren Bifano and Anna Herzog.

Freshmen Erin Gries received the All League Award for Competitive Cheer and is the first ever student council president at SCA. Here is her reflection on the team's successful first season:

St. Catherine of Siena once stated, “Nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring.” This explains what it has felt like to be on the first ever SCA competitive cheerleading team. We have given our all at a sport more than half of us have never tried before. This meant we had to learn all of the basic techniques and skills of the sport when all of our competitors were working on perfecting these skills. Overall, when it came to competitions and our expectations, we didn’t have any. We started from scratch with our arms sloppy and timing off, but with a confidence that we didn’t even know we had.

Going into our first competition we had heard that the people we were up against had been doing this for many years. This was an all-star competition that the best of the best had attended, all looking for first place. We heard this and immediately we just wanted to get out on those mats, yell, “Ready, set,"... and shock everyone. We wanted them to be asking, “What IS this school? Where are they from? Who are they?” That is exactly what they did.

Our hearts pumping, waiting for the final tallying of the scores, we knew that we had exceeded our expectations the moment we were done with our first performance on the mat. We had high hopes, and from the scores of the previous rounds (there are three rounds in a cheer competition) we had gotten excellent feedback. When we got the results, we got to see the looks on our fans’ faces when we had gotten fourth instead — one away from third. As we tried our absolute best, there was nothing else we could have asked for.

Over the last three months of cheer, we have completely surprised everyone who has seen us perform, ourselves being at the top of the list. We had come from not knowing how to count off the cheer, to shocking people with the result of fourth place in our first competition. We had not known what to expect, and we didn’t think we were going to do that great. We had been practicing with our hearts on our sleeves trying to make our team work. Because of all of the work that we had been doing, we just wanted everyone else to think that we had done great also.

Now not afraid of whom we face in our next competition, we are ready to set the cheer mats ablaze as we rock the floor in the next competitions to come and show them WHO WE ARE...Who is that you may ask? STARS.