TURNER – One pop song morphed into another as if someone turned a radio dial.
Techno beats shifted, and the voices switched from one teen diva to another.
None of the sounds coming from the boombox on the gymnasium floor seemed planned, yet the 16 members of the Turner Rebels moved in unison.
Standing in the center of the wide room, the girls marched in a triangle to the four-four rhythms. And they cheered, all for themselves.
“I try to explain it,” said Carolann McClellan, a tall 11-year-old who plays field hockey and softball and studies dance and tumbling. “Sometimes it’s hard, though.”
Both kids and adults have trouble understanding the group, which doesn’t carry pompoms and cheers for no one but itself.
“They’re a team of their own,” said Carolann’s mom, Michelle McClellan, who helped start the group.
These are competitive cheerleaders, part of a growing number of girls who are merging the athleticism of team sports and the art of dance.
Here in Turner, it began on a tiny budget that organizers are still trying to boost.
So far, the team is succeeding.
Already winning
Formed in the fall of 2003 by Michelle McClellan and Lindsay Valentine, the group has already won competitions. The first girls – in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades – took first place in each of last spring’s three contests, often before audiences of 1,000 or more.
This year, the group has opened itself to girls as young as kindergarten, though they have yet to compete.
The contests are run by the Maine Youth Cheerleading Coaches Association.
Taking their name from a uniform spotted in a magazine, the Rebels were formed under the umbrella of the River Valley Adult Education program.
McLellan and Valentine share coaching duties, with Valentine doing most of the choreography.
As the girls practice, Valentine, another Turner mom, stands in front. She watches as the squad divides into small groups that each prepare to lift one girl into the air.
Two succeed, sending cheerleaders above their shoulders. Another group struggles, lifting a girl about a foot before setting her on her feet again.
A moment later the music ends and Valentine rolls her eyes. There’s little coddling for the group, which has been practicing since November.
“We have lots to work on,” she says as the girls, some bending over, struggle to catch their breath.
Performance art
Valentine is proud, though.
They have succeeded without some key equipment, particularly a regulation-sized tumbling mat. The cushion, needed for every flip, costs about $4,000. McClellan and others are trying to get a sponsor to pay for the mat.
And they’ll try to keep spreading the word that cheering is just as athletic as playing basketball and as artistic as dancing.
“Most people think it’s all about bouncing up and down,” said Carolann McClellan. It’s not. It’s a performance.
When the crowds gather to watch, it can rattle her to the core, she said.
“You don’t know what it’s like until you do it,” she said. “I’m a nervous wreck.”
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