Meet the Lowellville cheer team’s new assistant coach, Livia Laudermilt! Alongside her mother, Angel Laudermilt, who has coached the LHS cheer team for 29 years, Livia has decided to take the step from Rocket Cheer alumni to coach. Livia is 20 years old and is currently a junior at Youngstown State University. She is majoring in Integrated Language Arts education and is a member of the Sokolov Honors College where she is a teacher’s assistant and a student assistant. After Livia receives her Bachelor’s Degree, she plans to get her Master’s in higher education or communications. She hopes to have a career in higher education and eventually get her PHD. In her free time, Livia enjoys exploring new places such as Florida and Disney World and being around her friends.
Livia has been a cheerleader for 11 years spanning over her whole life from Little Rockets, to High School Rockets then one year at Youngstown State University. Her favorite thing about cheer is the sense of family that you form with your team. Livia says, “cheer is not just a sport.”
Her favorite memory when she was an LHS cheerleader was her senior cheer camp at Ashland University for four days. She loved that the team had so much time to bond and winning the banana, the top spirit award at UCA, set the tone for the season. Her favorite memory with the current cheer squad is winning the banana at Akron University this summer. Livia says it was so special to experience that with this group because this year’s graduating seniors were Livia’s freshmen her senior year.
Livia was inspired to start coaching because of her mom and her love for the sport. She says she has been around cheer ever since she was born and she has grown to love it throughout her life. She says that getting the opportunity to coach with her mom fills her heart. When asked about Livia’s new coaching position Angel said she has “waited so long for this moment.”
Livia says the hardest part about transitioning from a cheerleader to a coach is getting out of the mindset that she is the one cheering. She had to reset and focus on making her cheerleaders the best they could be rather than herself. She says she has the skills but had trouble at first teaching them to her cheerleaders. Angel Laudermilt says that Liv brings her sense of leadership to the team and that motivates all of the cheerleaders to work harder. Angel feels that Livia brings new cutting edge ideas that Liv learned from college, that she would not have thought of before. She hopes that while Livia is coaching she learns that she has the ability to do anything and the confidence to make a difference.
