GRAND ISLAND -- Glitter is everywhere in the Heartland Events Center, on oversized ponytail bows and chiffon costumes and made-up eyelids.
Don’t let the accoutrements fool you.
The athletic ability of the 2,000 high school cheerleaders and dance team members competing Friday and Saturday at the Nebraska State Cheer and Dance Championships should not be underestimated.
They spin and dance and leap and pirouette. They do splits, and synchronize every move with their teammates. And they smile, through the high kicks and the lifts and the cartwheels and the cheers, showing off the culmination of months of work and practice.
“They learn their competition routines in the summer and work all year long till they come here,” said Aimee Parker, competition coach for Lincoln Southeast’s dance team, the Shirettes.
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They learn that routine, along with 20 or more they perform during high school sports events, dedicating 2½ hours a week to preparing for the competition.
Many of the students on the dance team are longtime dancers like senior Savannah Clover.
"I've been dancing almost as long as I could walk," she said.
She loves the competition.
“You come together as a team and realize how much you really mean to each other.”
Clover said the state competition -- and the national one the Shirettes will attend in March -- helps her peers understand the effort, time and talent that go into what they see during halftime at games.
“Dance is a sport,” Parker said. “By incorporating us into the state competitions with other (high school) competitions it really validates what we do and all the time we put into it.”
Sponsored by the Nebraska Coaches Association, the competition also acts as a fundraiser for the Nebraska High School Sports Hall of Fame Foundation. Each year, 80 percent of the revenue goes to the foundation, totaling more than $250,000 over the past decade, said NCA Executive Director Darin Boysen.
Now in its 10th year, the state competition isn’t sanctioned by the Nebraska School Activities Association but has followed a transition from cheerleading as a supporting role for athletes to a highly competitive sport itself.
In December, the International Olympic Committee gave provisional status to cheerleading, and there are myriad local, state and national competitions.
Lincoln North Star High School cheerleading coach Christina Nevitt sees that as a good thing, and more and more of her cheerleaders have competed in private cheer groups before getting to high school.
“These girls put in just as many hours as athletes in school,” she said.
And their season is longer than any other sport, spanning both fall and winter sports.
Lincoln North Star senior Taelor Evenson loves the competition because it’s the one time someone cheers for the cheerleaders.
“We support everyone else all year,” she said.
Southeast senior Sydney Long said dancing is a team sport in the true sense, because if they’re not working together, the routines fall apart, she said.
And that makes for solid friendships.
“I have a group of 11 other girls I can go to for anything and they’ll be there for me,” Long said.
The state competition includes various divisions: hip hop, high kick and pom for dancers; gameday, sideline, tumbling, nontumbling for cheerleaders.
For the first year, the gameday competitions are allow “stunting,” which means cheerleaders can lift each other into pyramid-like shapes. Schools have been able to choose whether to allow such lifts, but until this year the competition has prohibited them, as has the NSAA at district and state athletic contests.
Grand Island Public Schools cheerleader Skylar Penrose said incorporating lifts into the state championship routines makes it more nerve-racking because they're harder moves and she doesn’t want to misstep and hurt her team’s chances.
On Friday, Penrose hit those steps just fine, rising into the air on the hands of her teammates. And boy, it felt good.
“When you hit it you just smile bigger,” she said. “You look at the judges like ‘I just got that.’”