Everyone told me it was impossible.

In third grade, we had to write down a dream. I wrote that I wanted to go to the Olympics as an athlete, and my teacher told me to put down something more realistic. Bless her. She was probably right to think it.

I'm from a tiny town of 800 people. The closest gymnastics gym was over an hour away, and my high school didn't even have a cheer team. When I was a kid, my cousin asked if I wanted a cheer scholarship or a volleyball scholarship. When I said cheer, she told me those don't even exist. (They do. I got one.)

My whole life, people told me cheer wasn't a real sport. That it wouldn't take me anywhere.

And I'll be honest, I never did make the Olympics. My third-grade teacher was right about that part. But I pivoted, I fell in love with cheerleading, and I got to stand on a mat as one of only 24 athletes representing the United States at the highest level of our sport. Only six of us were backspots. I was one of them.

Talent wasn't the thing that got me there. It was hard work, grit, determination, and honestly, delusion to believe I could keep getting better.

I started tumbling by accident. My parents were late picking me up from my babysitter's one day, so she took me along to watch her daughter at power tumbling. The second I saw it, I couldn't look away. I was fascinated that you could move your body like that, and I got obsessed. I got good because I spent every single night in the gym, thirty hours a week, either tumbling or coaching so I could pay for more tumbling lessons. When I started cheering, it wasn't on teams that did the hard skills. I never even competed a full up until I got to Morehead.

I've never been the naturally gifted one. I've always had to be the one who worked significantly harder than everybody else, proving my worth to my teammates, my coaches, my friends, everyone.

Now everything has come full circle. I coach athletes and send them off to compete at the D1 level. I coached the U.S. Junior National Team after competing on the national team myself. One of my assistant coaches is a girl I used to coach at the first high school I ever worked at. I get to be the person for these kids that somebody was for me.

Nobody believed me, and I did it anyway.
So even if nobody believes in you, I do.
I'm rooting for you.