If you only ever watched Strawberry Crest warm up before the second round of last weekend’s UCA National High School Cheerleading Championships, you might have wondered how the heck the Chargers got there in the first place. Then they went out and competed for real, and showed everyone exactly why they were there — and why they now have five state championships to claim.
Crest’s flawless performance when it mattered most was enough to catapult the team up to fourth in the nation in the small co-ed division, the highest finish of any team hailing from Florida. Coach Loveny Rivas calls the top-five finish as “magical” an ending as anyone could have asked for.
“It was awesome,” Rivas said. “Truly a comeback story for the underdog. I couldn’t have written a story better myself.”
This team’s story starts with 15 boys and girls turning out to join the most successful program in Crest history. It was supposed to be a “rebuilding year,” which is often the case when less than half of a team has prior varsity experience, but that went out the window. Rivas said this team came together to learn unlike any other before it and, even though many of the girls and all of the boys were new, the effort they put in to learn their jobs was stellar.
The Chargers once again performed well at districts and got to advance to regionals. At regionals, Then Crest turned heads at regionals with an 89.50, the highest raw score in the state — that is, of any team in any division in the state.
Western Conference didn’t go so well, as there was a fall that hurt the team, but Rivas told the Chargers not to worry about it. That was going to be a teachable moment, a mistake to learn and rebound from.
“I feel like as a coach, your team sometimes needs to go through adversity so they learn how to troubleshoot, to work hard to overcome those battles,” Rivas said. “I’m glad that happened to us at Western because states was our chance to prove we could make a comeback.”
The team did just that on Feb. 1 in Gainesville, pulling off its routine with no deductions or mistakes at all to secure the five-peat with an 88.30, just over nine more points than runner-up East Bay, and head into UCA nationals on a high note.
Last season was the first in program history that the team went to the UCA event and didn’t even make it out of the preliminary round. Rivas and the Chargers were determined to not have that happen again, but the odds were working against them from the start.
First, the team had to learn a completely new routine from scratch in five days. Crest was allowed to mat two more cheerleaders for UCA competition than for FHSAA’s, so things had to change. Second, the team had such a bad showing on the first day that, if not for a successful coaching challenge by Rivas, it may not have made it to the second round at all. The Chargers faced a large points deduction for two falls and a safety infraction, so Rivas appealed the ruling. Within 45 tense minutes, the judges decided to deduct only six of the points. That was just enough to keep Crest alive at 14th place, basically the bottom of the barrel.
That was when that warm-up — “probably one of the worst in history,” Rivas said — happened.
“It was so bad that one of the UCA staffers actually started to spot our warm-up time because we were falling so badly,” she said.
Rivas doesn’t even remember everything she told the cheerleaders to motivate them during and after that warm-up. She basically “blacked out” and went on a roll, but the gist of what she does remember was that it wasn’t the first time the team faced such adversity. Western Conference wasn’t so long ago then, and the Chargers bounced back from that with a great showing at states.
The comeback kids did it again, looking like an entirely different squad than what people saw at the infamous warm-up. The first Crest team to ever get to the final round set a high bar for any that has to follow in its footsteps with its fourth-place finish.
“They went out there and hit everything so perfectly,” Rivas said. “They executed so well, so synchronized. As soon as everything was over, it was nothing but tears. Everybody was so emotional, It was amazing.”
This team’s motto is “champions can adapt to anything,” but the theme of its 2018-19 season was like another well-known motto: “it’s not how you start, but how you finish.”
ROSTER
Chloe Morter
Cassidy Coburn
Cassidy Meyer
Alexia Butler
Matthew Del Castillo
Tyson Rosania
Conner Murphy
Trinity Perry
Diamond Burgos
Aloanys Gil-Ramos
Mikenzie Shiflett
Heather Hienze
Madison DeShong
Samya Paris
Emili Alfieri
Karis Dell
Julia Affronti
Caitlyn Daniels
Dakota Grigson
Temperance Paris