Epic Athlete | Liv Jade

My name is Liv, I am 12 years old and I am from AUSTRALIA!! I have been cheering for almost 5 years and I am currently on a Senior 5R team.  My first cheer team was a youth 1 team, and the following season I was on a Junior 2 team.  I remember being so proud of myself that year having pushed to get my backhand spring, if only I knew back then what was coming.  My first gym was a small gym and we had no sprung floor to train on, so progressing further than a handspring was difficult but I persevered.  I used a local gymnastics center and took parkour classes to help with my tumbling and shortly after got my back tuck.  In My 3^rd  cheer season, we moved towns, nearly 3 hours away so I had to move to another gym.  This was the year everything started to come together for me.  I went from just getting my back tuck to my double all within one year.  From there I was unstoppable, I worked very hard and pushed myself to add more and more variety into my tumbling.  My 3^rd season I was put into a Junior 3 and Senior 4 team and then mid-season was also put into the Senior 5r team as well.  In Australia, it is very common for us to cross-compete over multiple teams. My 4^th season I competed in Australia’s first and only Junior 5 cheer team, a highlight for my cheer journey so far, which brings us to this year.

Being a cheerleader in Australia is great, it is still a relatively young sport here so we don’t have the quantity or quality of teams.   At our Nationals competition, we only have around 30 Level 5 teams in total across all divisions.  Most gyms are small in comparison to USA gyms, my gym has 90 athletes.  We also have an opposite season to the USA so we are about to have our final comp of the year, Nationals and Pinnacle (similar to summit) at the end of the month.  Throughout our cheer season, we often compete to win bids to USA cheer comps, and I have been lucky enough to travel to the USA to compete on many occasions.  A lot of our cheer clubs and cheer comps offer dance as well, and I have also danced for the last few years.

Being an Epic Athlete to me means always striving to do my best and to be the best role model I can.  The whole experience was incredible, from the 25-hour plane trip it took to get there to meeting and making lifelong friends.  Everyone instantly became friends, and age, teams or status meant nothing as we were all connected by our love of cheer. Getting to visit the Under Armour headquarters was mind-blowing in itself, the scale of it is HUGE.

My biggest goal is to do a season on a USA Worlds team, I would love to compete at Worlds and take a shot at the title.  Logistically there are quite a few hurdles to jump through before I am ready, but I have a goal and once I set my mind to something it’s only a matter of time…