Freshman Kayleigh Cruz participated in the 98th annual Macy’s Day Parade with Spirit of America Productions this past Thanksgiving. They marched and cheered to Macy’s and later performed a short dance. Her favorite part of the parade was being able to see all of the floats backstage, and she made friends with people from different schools such as Geneva High School. Despite performing in this year’s parade, the audition process actually started last year when she was in eighth grade.
Kayleigh says, “In eighth grade, during my Cheer Time Athletics cheer camp I was selected to be an All-American cheerleader where I was able to cheer for both Cleveland Cavaliers and Youngstown State basketball games, the Macy’s Day Parade was an optional performance.”
Over the past two years, she has cheered at two Cavs games. The process of these performances consisted of having about three practices, usually two to four hours each, where they learned the halftime sequence that they would perform at the game. Then, this past year, Spirit of America emailed Kayleigh to ask if she would like to be part of their all-American team this season as well.
The popularity of this parade is huge, so as you can imagine, the girls selected had to work extremely hard during their practices to ensure that everything would go smoothly.
Kayleigh says,” We had rehearsal for five days straight and each one was about four hours long. The first two days were just learning the dance and about every hour we would get a ten-minute break. Each day after that, there was a lot of rehearsing of the dance, and the choreographers made small changes to ensure that the dance looked as best as possible.”
While in New York City, Kayleigh attended two Broadway shows, Hell’s Kitchen and Wicked, visited the Statue of Liberty, went to the Empire State Building, and was able to visit Times Square. She also went shopping at the Oculus with her cheer group and new friends.
Congratulations to Kayleigh and the other local cheerleaders selected to perform in the parade. We are so proud of you!
