The IU Crimson all-girl cheerleading team was crowned national champions Sunday night at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.
The Hoosiers placed first in the All Girl Division IA at the UCA & UDA College Cheerleading and Dance Team National Championship.
The competition is tabbed as the most prestigious college cheerleading championship in the country. This year was the 25th anniversary.
Last year, the Hoosiers came in fifth place. It was just the second time in seven years the Hoosiers didn't win the national championship. That loss snapped a two-year title streak.
“It’s almost something that we needed because we had a team this year full of hard-working people,” junior Claudia Bradley said. “I think it’s hard because you need to keep that hard-working mentality every year, but how do you keep doing that when you haven’t failed? I think we all know what it was like, so in the future we just have to understand how good it felt to get something back and how hard we pushed ourselves to do it.”
The teams who placed behind IU this year were San Diego State University, Florida State University, the University of Oklahoma and the University of South Florida.
IU also won national championships in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017.
“Starting this season, we were really motivated because last year was so unfortunate, but we had a lot of hardships last year that we had to push back,” Bradley said. “We just talked about if we wanted this really bad, we had to push harder and we were motivated from the beginning to turn ourselves around completely and rise up.”
