‘Cheer’ Coach Confirms Who Will Return to Navarro Next Year
Laura Lee - August 20, 2020

Cheer is one of the best shows on Netflix (not an opinion, an actual fact)! So everyone is following the cheerleaders closely on Instagram and want to know if they’ll come back to Navarro College to cheer for another year. Last year, when Navarro was going for its 14th national championship title, the team go through 41 full-outs (an entire competition-level routine from start to finish) before Daytona. We got to see just how hard the team worked during the docuseries. This year the team reached 25 full-outs before the news that the NCA and NDA Collegiate Cheer and Dance Championship in Daytona, FL, was canceled due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In an interview with coach Monica Aldama, she told POPSUGAR that the team had a great routine planned and had been aiming for 51 full-outs this year. In 2019, when Navarro was going for its 14th national championship title, “we flipped the numbers and said we’d do 41 full-outs,” Aldama said. (It’s a superstition.) Choreographer Andy Cosferent suggested that they do the same thing for 2020, so they flipped their attempted 15th championship win, 51. “That’s a lot of full-outs, but we were definitely even ahead of ourselves a little bit because we still had enough time to get to that number,” Aldama noted.

Getty Images/Entertainment/Anna Webber

The group looked “really good” before Daytona got canceled. Aldama even said that when they wrapped up their spring break practices, they felt like they could have gone out and performed if they needed to. Aldama, though, has some fantastic news for all of us: tumbler and flyer Gabi Butler will be returning for another season — after she told us in May that it was a possibility — and so will tumbler Lexi Brumback. Both cheerleaders confirmed their returns to Navarro on Instagram. “This next year is going to be iconic and I’m so excited,” Brumback wrote. Butler shared images of herself cheering at Navarro. “I can’t wait to be back at the place that makes me happiest,” she captioned the post.

Butler and Brumback are still eligible to stay on the community college’s team because Daytona was canceled. “You don’t use your eligibility unless you actually compete, and we only get the opportunity to do that one time during the year,” Aldama explained. She further told Us Weekly, “For NCA, which is the company that we compete with for competition, you have five years of eligibility and three of those can be at a junior college.” Aldama said that it’s ultimately up to the students. “I did have some kids that were graduating that, because the season got canceled, they wanted to come back and compete again next year,” she said. Many Navarro students get “general studies degrees” and take core classes, but those who are returning could work toward a more specific degree plan which they can transfer to a university down the road.

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