This past month, Greenhill Cheer Team won first place in the small novice school division at the Redline Texas Grand Nationals.

This tournament served as the wrap up for their winter season. Typically winter season would have started in December 2022 and finished at the end of February 2023, but this school year, a scheduling confusion pushed the competition back.

“The good news is it was in the Frisco Star Center; it was a really nice facility. The girls got to go there and see where the Cowboys got to practice at,” said Cheer Secretary Anneli Phillip.

For the first three weeks of the season, three consultants from Cheer Express along with Greenhill’s Head Cheer Coach Elyse Bailey made sure which stunts they wanted to put in the show and made sure that the cheerleaders could do them.

After that, they got the stunt groups organized.

In order to keep the flyers and the bases safe, the team spent a lot of time practicing the coordinated stunts.

“There’s a correct way to lift and there’s a correct way to dismount, and they had to make sure the girls could do that,” said Phillip.

Once the coaches felt that all the stunts and flips were safe, the routine was broken down, and in between the stunts the dance routine was added.

Their next step was adding music. Music is the last part of learning the routine. The music was not given to the cheerleaders until three weeks before the competition.

“We had music reveal week, which is very exciting. The girls were so excited,” Phillip said.

They did a couple of run-throughs with the music so they would get a feel for the routine with the music.

After that they just rehearsed and tightened up the routine until the competition. Toward the end, the girls strove to clean up the routine. This was the first week they did “full outs.”

“We worked a lot on stunting, so everyone felt very secure,” said senior cheerleader Sydney Pitts.

On the day of the competition, the Greenhill cheer team began their performance at 8 A.M., although the cheerleaders arrived for warmups at 6:30 A.M.

“It was a very hectic day,” Pitts said.

They proceeded to stretch and get loose, followed by a run through of their show.

“It was a little intimidating. While this is all going on teams around us doing the exact same thing and teams behind us that were patiently waiting and staring out us,” Phillip said.

Their performance was described by Pitts as “nerve-racking.”

Pitts says, “so much of our season was leading up to this point,” and the team wanted to “leave it all out on the floor.”