I have been dancing all of my life. I have learned many impressive skills over the years, some of the coolest being backhand springs, back flips, and aeriels (no-handed cartwheels). As a senior I wanted to take the opportunity to join a school sport since it was my last chance to do so. I decided to cheer for basketball since I love watching basketball anyway, and I could use my dance skills here. 

When practices started, it was clear I was the only one who could do this kind of tumbling. So our coach determined that I would go back and forth across the court doing flips at the start of every game, when our players got called out. When I started doing this I got many cheers and compliments. Other parents and spectators went up to my mom asking “Why hasn’t she been cheering her entire life? She could have been flipping across the court for years!” I have also received a lot of compliments about my high and impressive jumps. 

During one of our halftime performances, I did a lot of tumbling there. I also tumbled during time-outs, and got a big applause from the student section. Recently the holiday break happened, so we went longer than usual without cheering. I cheered/tumbled in one game after Christmas, but then took a week break because I was out of town for New Year’s. The first game after the new year that I cheered in was the charity night game in honor of state trooper Jay Rougeau. 

At the start of the game, I did my usual tumbling passes during the starting line-up. Then we had a halftime performance. In this halftime performance I was supposed to do flips across the floor while girls behind me were stunting. The first flip I did was a backflip, but what happened after the backflip was unbelievable. I landed the backflip fine, but then after I was already on my feet I took a few steps backwards and sat down on my butt. I just had too much power in my rotation and over rotated. I was so embarrassed and didn’t think anything like that would ever happen to me. But I knew this was just a fluke and had never happened before. So I stood up, and whipped out eight more flips! And I nailed every single one of them. 

After we got off of the court I was so humiliated but everyone around me told me I was fine and made up for it. I thought so, too. I knew that they all had seen me do these flips so many times before. At this time I was just trying to make myself feel better, so I reminded myself that most likely nobody in the room besides me could just casually tumble like that in the first place. I also was grateful that my mistake wasn’t me crashing upside down mid-flip. All I did was land on my feet and then stumble back a few steps onto my butt. I also was thinking that so many more embarrassing things have happened to other people. At one of our games a girl fell out of her stunt and sat right on a different girl’s face, breaking that girl’s glasses and busting open the girl’s lip which left blood all over her face. And since my minor fail, I have tumbled great at the rest of our games.