ETV News stock photo by Dusty Butler
Emery cheer is entering its competition season and will do so under new head coach Maegan Butterfield.
“The girls are awesome,” said Butterfield. “As bad as the year as been [due to the coronavirus], it has gone as good as it could have.” It appears that the cheer season has the best chance to be completed, even with the virus hanging around. “We will end up going virtually,” Butterfield said if schools start to get shut down. “We will still do our routines, but we’ll record them and then have a due date that we will need to send them in by. As far as I know, we are still planning to have the competitions in person.”
Butterfield is excited about both the youth and potential of the group. “I have a really good team this year. I actually have more freshman than returners this year.” Butterfield continued,” They are all very strong athletes and they have come in with strong tumbling skills. We’re actually competing in harder categories this year. I don’t know how the end results will be with the new categories this year, but I’m excited to see how they will do. I have full confidence in them that they will do very well.”
Emery has also added a male cheerleader, which brings more versatility to the group. “This is the first year we have had a stunt man,” Butterfield said. “So, that has been fun for us to try new stunts.” She also mentioned the lone senior of the crew, Kylie Cunningham, “is a strong athlete and brings a lot to our team. She has tumbling skills and flying skills. I can put her in any position.”
Because of the tumbling strength of the team, Emery will be entering new categories to compete against more schools. The Spartans will compete in Freestyle, Timeout Dance, Co-Ed with Tumbling and All Girls with Tumbling. The last two categories are new to the Spartans and are under the Show category.
“I could not have asked for a better team during the pandemic,” concluded Butterfield. “These kids are fast learners and they come in and do what I ask. Our team motto is ‘We can’. We can achieve hard things, enter these new categories, we can… that has been our whole attitude this year.”