They are Rocky Balboas with poms poms.
Against all odds, the scrappy squad from the Lower East Side’s Seward Park high school campus is headed to the national championships at Walt Disney World next month. They are believed to be only the second Manhattan public high school ever to make the nationals.
The 14 girls managed to secure a spot in the Feb. 11 Universal Cheerleaders Association competition despite scant experience, hand-me-down uniforms, a lack of equipment, or dedicated practice space.
“We have to practice in the weight room. We have to move all this big weight equipment and stuff to get the mats out,” said Kayla Martin, 17, a senior at New Design High School, one of five schools on the Seward Park campus.
The team only has three mats and really needs seven, according to Giana Quinterno, the coach who helped get the squad started when she arrived in 2015 as a social-work intern. A former high school cheerleader, Quinterno saw a notice for team tryouts and volunteered to pitch in, soon becoming the volunteer coach.
The city’s Public School Athletic League doesn’t recognize cheerleading as a sport and doesn’t fund it. Few city schools even have teams.
Among Quinterno’s challenges was teaching the current team the stunts and tricks that go into competitive cheerleading.
“Essentially, I have a team of inexperienced athletes who’ve never cheered a day in their lives,” Quinterno recalled.
The COVID-19 pandemic derailed the team in the fall of 2020 and most of the current squad joined in the spring, with a few coming on board in September.
Lana Garcia, 17, a senior at Essex Street Academy, said she joined because she saw cheerleaders as garnering a lot of respect. She became a flyer — the girl who is held aloft and tossed in the air.
“Of course it was scary,” she said. “I wanted to try it and I trusted my coach.”
Celese Seabrooks, 17, a junior at Essex Street, said the team members caught on quickly.
“Anything that Giana would tell them, any corrections, they just took it and they ran with it,” she said.
The team raised money to go to a training camp over the summer to learn to polish their skills.
Last month, they put all their practicing to the test when they competed in a regional contest on Long Island.
The night before the competition they did a kind of dress rehearsal at Seward Park in front of judges Quinterno brought in to assess their routine. They fared poorly, but the girls pulled it together.
“We talked to each other. We got revved up,” said Grace Ayodele, 16, a junior at New Design.
They didn’t learn their score until they were headed back to the city and heard they had earned enough points for nationals.
“We were just screaming in the car. We were mind blown,” Garcia said.
Martin said the trip to Orlando will be her first time on a plane.
The trip won’t come cheap. Quinterno set up a GoFundMe appeal that has raised more than $15,000 to cover the team’s expenses, with any additional funds going toward equipment or future training.
“Our team is a sisterhood. We have such a bond,” said Ayodele.