The Diary of a University Cheerleader featuring Nottingham Trent Tigers

    October has been a very successful start to the season for the Tigers. At the beginning of the month, we held tryouts across our City and Clifton campuses and had over 300 people try out! We had so much interest from freshers and returning students that we put on extra taster sessions so people could attend. Our coaches had a tough time figuring out our teams as the standard was so high this year, this resulted in us creating another team giving us a total of 8 teams. This year we have a Performance squad who will be performing at our charity and external events this year, multiple Varsity squads who participate in the largest annual varsity series in Europe and our Competition squads that will be competing nationally.

Our team has been training hard, learning and perfecting new stunts and tumbles. The Competition teams have started preparing for this year’s competitions already, with Head Coach Stefan teaching them everything they need to know for their routines. The competition teams also train weekly at the local EMCA gym to practise their tumble skills with our Tumble coach Josh. Our training team is also super impressed with how our athletes’ skills are developing, learning difficult stunts and picking up dances and sequences.   This year we really want to increase our charity and community involvement and what better way to do that than begin the year as we mean to go on! This month our athletes participated in themed training sessions which included wearing yellow for World Mental Health day and dressing as superheroes to support a charity helping children with cancer. In one session alone we were able to raise over £65 and money is still being collected over the next week in aid of the charity.   Also this month we have had our weekly social to Ocean with other sports teams and societies at NTU. This is a great opportunity for our athletes to get together and have some fun! With so many squads it’s always nice to have a whole club social so that members from different squads can get to know each other. This month our members dressed up as Tigers and for themes including back to school and zoo project. Everyone made a huge effort and looked fantastic! Our Social Secretaries have also been busy planning our first welcome event for the club. It’s due to take place in November and we’re very excited! Although it’s only the start of the season, as our team gets settled there will be lots more exciting news and events throughout the year. If you want to see even more action from us make sure you follow us on our social media @NTUCheerleading on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.