Audio clip
Morgan Myers
When it comes to cheerleading, the Soddy-Daisy High School football squad has won the Super Bowl.
The 15-member group is the 2008 Small Varsity Division National Cheerleaders Association champion, beating out six other teams from around the nation.
“It was nerve-wrecking, intimidating, but once we got there our heart showed through,” said sophomore cheerleader Breanne Johnson. “We really wanted to win.”
Ms. Johnson was one of 15 Soddy-Daisy cheerleaders who arrived at the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport on Tuesday after a two-day championship competition in Dallas.
“The NCA is the Super Bowl of cheerleading,” said Whitney Ward, a former Soddy-Daisy cheerleading captain now a student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “It is the hardest cheerleading competition there is.”
Ms. Ward was among supporters who gathered Tuesday afternoon at the airport in anticipation of the team’s arrival. She was holding a gold, blue and pink poster that read “National Champs, Baby.”
The crowd erupted with handclaps, raised posters and balloons as the cheerleaders walked down the airport hallway near the escalators. Wearing red T-shirts, black jackets and jeans, the girls held up the black, blue and red NCA championship banner. Girls at the end of the line carried the championship trophy that stood shoulder high to 5-foot-3-inch team co-captain Morgan Myers.
The Soddy-Daisy girls hadn’t won the championship since 2002, said Jo Ellen Craze, the school’s former longtime cheerleading coach who returned this year to assist Coach Vicki Jackson.
Krista Guinn, mother of cheerleader Halee Guinn, was among nearly a dozen parents who flew to the Dallas competition but returned to Chattanooga on an earlier plane. At the airport, she waited with a gold rose for each cheerleader.
“It’s real intense, very competitive because all of the girls want it and they work so hard,” she said, speaking in a whisper because she lost her voice while cheering for the girls during competition.
Many of the cheerleaders had been practicing five days a week since March to prepare, Ms. Guinn said. The choreographed routine was a little more than two minutes long, with part of it performed without music, Ms. Jackson said.
Ms. Myers said the best part of the competition is “knowing that everything that we worked for and dreamed of came true.”
Yolanda Putman has been a reporter at the Times Free Press for 11 years. She covers housing and previously covered education and crime. Yolanda is a Chattanooga native who has a master’s degree in communication from the University of Tennessee and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Alabama State University. She previously worked at the Lima (Ohio) News. She enjoys running, reading and writing and is the mother of one son, Tyreese. She has also ...
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