By AUBRIE GEORGE | The Marlton Telegram
It’s 6:30 p.m. on a late August evening and inside the TNT All Stars gym, it’s hot — but the 50 or so girls strewn about the room are there to work.
Instead of soaking up the last rays of summer sun, like many of their peers, these girls, the Marlton Chiefs junior squad, have been hard at work for weeks in preseason camp where they’ve been preparing for a four month-long season of highly competitive cheerleading.
The cheerleaders, dressed head to toe in orange and white, are not required to be at the gym until September, when practice becomes mandatory, but most of them are there — stretching, conditioning, going over choreography, tossing girls 10 feet in the air as they practice stunts.
Their coach, Dana Buciorelli, is the president and founder of The Marlton Chiefs Competitive Cheerleading Program Inc., which is a non-profit organization that hosts a competitive, recreational cheerleading squad consisting of about 130 girls from Evesham and a few from surrounding towns.
The competition squad was born in 2008, when Buciorelli broke away from coaching under the Marlton Recreational Council’s cheerleading organization to establish an organization that offers local girls an outlet to cheer in a strictly competitive forum.
“I just realized that a lot of the girls weren’t really that interested in football cheerleading,” Buciorelli said.
The answer, Buciorelli thought, was to give girls who were serious about training for and performing routines at cheerleading competitions a place to do so.
From Aug. 1 through mid-December, Buciorelli and a team of trained and certified trainers, coaches and staff lead three squads, divided by age, in practices that aim to design and perfect routines for mat performances at several local and out-of-state cheerleading competitions.
See this week’s print edition of The Telegram for the full story.
