If you’re like me, you might get those “first practice jitters” every school year when your sport is back to starting up. Maybe questions will be filling throughout your head all day and you can’t focus on anything else:

How is the first day going to be?

Who is going to show up?

Who is going to be in my stunt group?

Those are just a few questions I think of throughout the day. But most importantly, what should you expect when going to the first cheerleading practice of the year? We do numerous things throughout our usual three-hour practices, but the one thing we start off doing is getting to know one another. If you don’t know your team, how are you able to work together?

What we do after we get to know each other a little bit is do jump lines. When we do those, we all get into lines and practice jumps that will soon end up in our routine. Those consist of: toe touches, pikes, and both right and left hurdler (all pictured below, including more).

After we are done with that, then comes forming stunt groups. We start with people who have previously cheered and separate them by flyer, back spot, and the bases. A quick overview of what each of those positions are if you weren’t here for my last post:

A back spot is someone who stands in the back of the stunt holding the flyers ankles, making sure she doesn’t fall and if she does, she needs to make sure that she catches the flyer. There are two bases in a stunt group, they have the responsibility of the flyer while holding onto her feet. The flyer is the one at the very top of the stunt, their responsibility is to stay very tight, when doing that, it makes it easier on the bases because she will feel much lighter.

Once our coach comes up with our stunt groups, we practice our stunts with each other. Some basic stunts that will consist of our first practice is a half, full, a liberty (lib) and maybe a tick tock (switch up) on the first day.

A half is when the bases and back spot are holding the flyer at chest-level. A full is when all three positions have their arms extended all the way up and are holding the flyer above their heads. When you do a lib, the flyer is only on one foot, where the others she is on two. There are two different variations of the lib stunt, you can do it either in a half or full, but a full is much easier surprisingly. Lastly, if some stunt groups make it through the stunts quick enough, our coach might have them do a switch up. This stunt is just like a lib, but the flyer will be switching her legs mid-air. So, she will be ending up on a different leg than she started on.