The ordained afternoon had weighed heavily on their minds, and finally it arrived. More than 70 girls, freshmen and sophomores at brand-spanking-new Cinco Ranch High School, arrived fresh-faced and nervous to try out for drill team. The girls, most of whom were enrolled in a PE class specifically dedicated to preparing for this very day, wanted badly to earn the distinction, to be named members of the Cinco Ranch Cougar Stars.
Deron Neblett
Katie and Mary Betzler, tasting the bitter.
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Half of them wouldn't be, of course, and this would be a standard adolescent disappointment under the best of circumstances.
The handout that had gone home to the girls' parents months earlier suggested that this particular disappointment, for those fated to suffer it, might be worse. The handout had specified, amid long lists of the athletic and financial travails to which Stars would be subjected, that girls, should they be chosen, would be required, by virtue of the uniforms they would wear, to "keep in good and attractive physical shape." Those girls who made the cut, the handout promised, would receive "much glory and recognition," and their experience as Stars would "help ease the transition from adolescence into adulthood." The team was referred to as a "sisterhood."
Any sister who didn't make the cut was clearly -- given the prevailing logic of 15-year-old girls -- a fat, gawky freak headed for a future devoid of glory and recognition.
The girls were divided into 18 groups, each herded by one of the 18 Stars carried over from the previous year. The 18 returning Stars were technically trying out for the team afresh before a panel of professional dance judges, but the new girls knew what was up with that. Anyone could see that the established Stars were all wearing matching silver hair scrunchies, and what possible purpose could that serve but to identify them as favorites to the judging panel? The girls thought the drill team teacher, a woman by the name of Hankins, must surely have been behind that bit of subterfuge, but there was nothing to be done about it. The logical skills of the 15-year-old girls were quite well developed enough to know that a high school without favoritism would be no high school at all.
So the girls tried out. They did their kicks and their splits and their leaps and their rolls and tried to present a good and attractive physical shape while three judges marked pencil on paper and decided whether or not each girl in turn would become a Star.
Some few hours later, the girls were handed sealed envelopes as school let out, and instructions were reiterated: School staff had already warned the parents of potential Stars about the risk of embarrassment and emotional trauma if the girls all ripped open their envelopes right there in the parking lot, in front of each other, and found out all at once who was bound for glory and recognition and who was not. The envelopes were to be opened only after the girls had gotten into their mothers' cars, or arrived safely at home in the new one- or two-story brick-sheathed houses that had sprouted in the freshly sodded Katy prairie to accommodate them all.
Katie Betzler took her envelope to her mother Mary's car, got inside and opened it.
"Lord," it said in bold black print, "you have taught me to accept defeat, to taste the bitter when I sought the sweet... Knowing the longest nights bring hopeful dawn, I gather up the pieces, and go on."
When Katie Betzler saw that, she says, it made her feel "like a nothing, basically."
When Mary Betzler saw it, she was appalled.
Mary Betzler, a former cheerleader herself in her home state of Missouri, wants to be perfectly clear that her complaint is not distilled of sour grapes. Yes, her daughter has an 11-year background of private classes in ballet, jazz and tap. And yes, Katie did earn ribbons, which her mother has photocopied for a reporter, identifying her as "Superior" and "All Star Performer" at mandatory pre-tryout clinics. But that was before Katie fractured her pelvis during the drill-team prep class, rendering her unable to perform her left split, so it's no big surprise Katie didn't make the team.
What bothers Mary Betzler is not that Katie didn't make the team, but just about every other aspect of the experience. Like the fact that her daughter's teacher failed to notice that Katie was injured and continued to push her to participate even after a long overdue diagnosis led to a doctor's note specifying total rest. Like the school literature implicitly urging already willowy girls like Katie toward further trimness and, Betzler worries, eventual eating disorders. Like the note, issued to students by an educational institution, defining them as defeated.
What's wrong, Mary Betzler thinks, is the entire culture being bred -- naively or otherwise -- by the whole Cinco Ranch drill-team process. The famous Title IX, she notes, was passed way back in 1972, guaranteeing equality among male and female athletes within the educational system. But her son, a benchwarmer on his high school football team, still suits up under a no-cut policy, and he was never sent home with a note labeling him a loser, and he was certainly never told he'd have to keep himself looking chiseled and buff.
