Cheer Extreme competing in The Cheerleading Worlds

Published 4:44 pm Saturday, April 30, 2011

By Edwin Modlin

Another area all-star cheerleading squad, this one with three members from Washington, has received a bid to compete in The Cheerleading Worlds in Orlando, Fla., this weekend.
The Washington members — Carly Buckman, Miranda Tyson and Frankie Stessans — are competing on a 20-member coed team. They commute between Washington and Greenville two to three times a week to train four hours at a time at Cheer Extreme Allstars in Greenville.
Melinda Bridges, co-owner of Cheer Extreme Allstars, is from Washington, too, and she is accompanying the team to Florida.
“The teams that are competing are the highest levels of teams, as they are levels five- and six-categories,” she said. “This team, in particular, I’m so proud of because they’ve only been together for about three months.”
Bridges said Cheer Extreme Allstars took its best 20 students and formed the coed team. Afterward, the team received an invitation to compete in the Florida event, which thrilled the team since it had been together for such a short time.
The ages of the team members range from 13 to 18 years old.
“They train twice a week for about three hours at a time,” Bridges said. “It’s pretty intense actually.”
“They’re in shape and young and are very conditioned,” she said. “We spend all summer training and conditioning them, so when August gets here we run routine after routine and fix little things that need to be fixed.”
Bridges said Cheer Extreme is the first “first-year” gym to ever receive a bid from The Cheerleading Worlds.
There are three kinds of bids offered to teams. The best bid is when the competition organization pays for a team’s expenses — food, lodging, travel and more. The second-best bid is when the organization pays for food and lodging.
“An at-large bid is what we got, and the parents have to pay for everything,” Bridges said. “And it costs about $550 per kid to go.”
To help cover its expenses, Cheer Extreme has been conducting a variety of fundraising events to raise the money needed to send the team to Florida, Bridges said.
“They’ve been able to raise most of the money, so we’re thankful for that,” she said.
In North Carolina, Cheer Extreme has locations in Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Kernersville, Lake Norman and Sanford.  Greenville and will be opening a new gym soon. It has six other teams from throughout the state that received bids to The Cheerleading Worlds.

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