Katie Dalton won a state championship, national gymnastics competition gold medals and plans to compete in the Miss Kentucky Pageant in January 2012.
Countless medals and awards adorn her bedroom. Sometimes it’s hard for her to remember which ribbon or medal goes with which event.
What Katie might achieve before she turns 15 is anyone’s guess but hers.
But she doesn’t leave much to guessing.
“I always want to do it perfectly, and I’ll do it until I do it perfectly,” she said. “I do the same thing everyday: Go to school, go to cheer, go do homework and go to bed.”
The formula gets results.
She went out for track in the spring, and she only missed by inches tying the state record for her age in the long jump.
The head coaches of the University of Kentucky and University of Tennessee made a point to personally introduce themselves to her at cheerleading camp last summer. Katie wants to cheer and run track in college.
Her life at age 14, in Meece Middle School, keeps tumbling forward.
“She doesn’t realize how big it is that Division-I colleges are looking at her, and she’s only an eighth-grader,” says her stepfather, Rick McCrystal.
Not necessarily.
Katie’s penchant for perfection runs from little details such as pulling her hair back to make it just so to nailing the moves in a cheerleading routine. Grueling cheer practices can take up to three hours, and then she heads to the gym to perfect her gymnastics skills most nights of the week. Her motivation can waver, but she goes back at it the very next day.
She has spent a lot of days doing that.
Katie started competing in gymnastics at age 4, which also plays a big part in shaping her independence. Joining the cheerleading team was new to her, and it took some adjusting to get used to the responsibilities of shifting from solo performance to a group. After three years of cheerleading, Katie still falls back on her gymnastics tendencies. She can enjoy time with the team but remains quite content doing her own thing.
Even a group of cheerleaders can become a unit.
“Well, tons of the time my friends go to the movies, but I have cheer,” she says. “I’d rather pick my team than going with my friends.”
Even in class, while her mates talk loudly, joking and laughing together, Katie quietly takes everything in, doing her work and listening intently.
She keeps tumbling forward, quickly, from teenager to young woman.
Sometimes it takes a burst of text messaging to remind people she’s just 14. But it’s fleeting.
“I don’t want to quit, because I don’t want someone to get better than me,” Katie says about cheering — and tumbling, running and winning.
“I don’t know where I’d go without it.”
