Flying High Neelyville, Poplar Bluff earn state cheer honors

Butler County cheerleaders are among the best in the state, and they have the awards to prove it.

Poplar Bluff High School Mules cheerleaders captured first in their division at the state competition this weekend at Southeast Missouri State University. Neelyville Tigers varsity cheerleaders brought home second place in the Class 1-Small division.

Poplar Bluff coach Kim Smith and Neelyville coach Brandi Lumby praised their teams.

This is Smith’s third year as coach and Lumby’s sixth year.

When Smith became coach, “I kept doing what they were doing. These girls live and breathe for competitions. That’s their sport. These girls’ main focus is those three minutes on that mat.”

Smith’s assistant coach is Brianna Jones.

For competition, teams don’t get an entire season like other sports do, Smith said. They get regionals and a three-minute routine. Then they get state. That’s another a three-minute routine, and that’s it. That’s what determines if a team wins or not.

“You make a mistake in those three minutes and that’s it,” Smith said. “So it’s tough these girls spend months and months practicing every week, days on days and hours upon hours for that three minutes. It’s a high pressure sport.”

They start dreaming of this when they are kids, Smith said. “The little ones dream of being competitive cheerleaders. You have to start learning how to tumble and learning how to do this sport. It’s not something that you can just go, ‘Oh, I think I’m gonna do that’ one day. You have to be raised up in it.”

“I am so incredibly proud of these girls,” Smith said. “We don’t have any seniors. I have a whole lot of juniors. They were freshmen my first year. They’re so special to me. They are the best group of girls. I just love them.”

The PBHS cheer squad practices anywhere from eight to 10 hours a week.

Smith said, “Practice doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but after being at school all day, five days a week, it’s a lot with games. It’s a lot and that’s just at cheer practice, that doesn’t include the girls who go to tumbling work out at a private gym. These girls, they sacrifice a lot to be on this squad.”

Normally, the Poplar Bluff group goes to the St. Louis regionals because it’s the closest one. The high school took first at St. Louis. The junior high usually does another competition put on by someone other than the Missouri Cheerleading Coaches Association. Since they could not find one close, Savannah Weitzel asked Athletic Director Kent Keith if they could go to the second regionals in the state.

When he allowed it, “I was like, can we go? So we went. It was crazy,” Smith said. “When I say these girls, powered through and push through, when we went to Kansas City, we had a football game that Friday night. We got on the bus at midnight outside the school, drove all night on a school bus, tried to sleep. We competed at nine o’clock Saturday morning.

“You talk about tired individuals,” Smith said. “We had to stay awake until a little after lunch for awards. We were one of the first groups to go. It was a long, long day, and for them to get first there was unbelievable. I am so proud of these girls. I mean, they can power through anything. It’s amazing. They’re amazing. That’s a tall order.”

Lumby, who has coached the Neelyville squad six years, praises the hard work and dedication of her cheerleaders.

“So I took over the program, started revamping it to what actually the kids wanted,” Lumby said. “I had some cheerleaders in previous years, who were really, really driven and their goal was someday we could go competitive. It took us a couple of years to make that dream a reality. It was the cheerleaders who actually inspired us to do this over the years.”

Lumby’s assistant coach is Jennifer Barker.

Neelyville has eight on it’s squad.

“We are Class 1 because we’re a small school, and then we are a small division because our team is small,” Lumby said.

Sacrifice is a word familiar to both winning squads.

Lumby said, “We have sacrificed a lot. We set this goal, but we didn’t want to slack on any of our normal duties. We still went to every ball game that our teams have. We cheer for the boys and the girls for high school. We would sneak in a practice here, go to a ball game or practice at the ball game. We do Saturday practices. So really, any time we could get in practice, we would. We started preparing this summer.”

The group learned the routine and started working towards the goals.

The Neelyville group works closely with Poplar Bluff Cheer and Tumbling. The team does its own music and makes changes and addition to the routine as needed.

Since this is Neelyville’s first year to compete, Lumby said, they didn’t know what to expect. In October, the team competed in regionals.

“We placed third at regionals in St. Louis,” Lumby said. “We didn’t expect to place third. We were excited. We came home and tried to beef up our routine. To qualify for state, you had to score a certain score at regionals in order to move on to state, which is what we did in Cape this weekend.”

The Neelyville squad had to overcome injuries right before the state event.

“We had to totally change our routine Wednesday night since we had an injury. We had to decide what to do. The girls voted and wanted to go ahead and push through and just change the routine. So they really persevered in working through obstacles together, so it was very inspiring.”

The team is still dreaming after their second place victory at state.

Since this was the squad’s first year out, Lumby said, “we just wanted to have fun. We wanted to make our school proud and do the best that we could. Getting second is icing on the cake.”