MacArthur cheer teams are headed to nationals

Three groups of MacArthur High School students who are used to creating cheers will be receiving them next month.

Three separate cheerleading teams from the high school have earned a bid to the 2023 National High School Cheerleading Championship at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando Feb. 10-12.      

Levittown’s General Douglas MacArthur High School, which counts students from Wantagh, Seaford and Levittown, has numerous cheer teams, and three of them have qualified for nationals — the Game Day team, the Traditional team, and the junior varsity team.

The Game Day and JV teams are co-ed, while the Traditional team is an all-girl squad.

The teams perform on the sideline at MacArthur’s football games, but once the season is over in November, the cheer teams enter competitions of their own.

All three teams competed at the Universal Cheerleaders Association’s Poconos Regional Championship in early December and came home to Levittown with bids to attend the pinnacle in high school cheerleading competitions at Disney. The Game Day and JV teams took first place in their divisions at the regional championship, while the Traditional team took second place.

“When I first started working here, I coached lacrosse,” Lisa Nessler, the cheer teams’ coach, said. “Then I saw they needed a cheer coach. I had cheered my entire life, so I thought it would be fun. Then I realized how into it the cheerleaders were. These students’ drive motivated me to learn more.”

Cheerleading is, for the most part, a year-round activity. The teams start the school year performing at football games before entering their own competitive season. Regional and national championships take place at the end of one year and the beginning of the next, respectively, with county and state championships to follow. All of this wraps up in early March, but the teams begin practicing again in April.

Last year, the Traditional team was able to bring home a win in the state championships. Now MacArthur is aiming even higher, for a possible win in nationals.

Seniors Lauren Dean, Lea Calvo, Kelly O’Leary, and Bailey Rothman recalled learning dance at a very young age and parlaying it into a cheerleading career at school.

“I moved here in second grade,” Dean said. “I did dance where I used to live. But here it seemed like everyone did cheer. So I took lessons and stuck with it for 10 years.”

Two other seniors, Priya Lall and Angelo Mansilla-Ramos, had an unconventional introduction to cheerleading, but now find themselves at the pinnacle of MacArthur’s team.

“We started in my backyard, during the pandemic,” Lall said. “We haven’t been doing cheer for our entire lives. We’ve been doing it for maybe two years, total.”

The current crop of seniors were in their freshman year when Covid-19 first struck, but Lall and Mansilla-Ramos were able to turn that unfortunate circumstance into something good, with the help of a friend who had been on the JV team. That next year, they both joined the JV team as sophomores.

“Our attitudes,” senior Kelly O’Leary said of what makes MacArthur cheerleading special. “There are, of course, times when things go wrong, but we don’t play the blame game. We pick each other up and motivate each other, and find out what we can all do better.”

The students and coach agree that the bond the teams share seems special, almost like a family. The school’s administrators said they are proud of what this team has accomplished.

“As you can see, this is a very special group of athletes,” Joseph Sheehan, MacArthur’s principal, said. “Look at their work ethic, camaraderie, and accomplishments. But in all they have achieved, they’ve always stayed modest. They represent the true Generals’ nation work ethic.”