“I absolutely love Northeastern State” Those were some of the first words uttered by cheerleader Macey Crawley when our interview began. She’s now in her second year at Northeastern State University, though still classified as a freshman due to Covid rules. “NSU was my first choice of colleges and being accepted into the President’s Leadership Class was just icing on the cake,” said Macey.

She began cheering in middle school in her hometown of Noble and cheered all through high school, making team captain her senior year. There was another factor during her high school days that led her to choose NSU. “I worked in an optometry office in high school and thought I wanted to pursue that in college. And since NSU is the only state college with an optometry school, it was just another reason to head for Tahlequah. I later decided I wasn’t as much in love with optometry as I thought, so I changed to speech language pathology which NSU also has a good program for and then I can switch back if I change my mind.”

When she arrived on campus, she saw a notice for cheer tryouts and went through the unusual routine of having tryouts online due to the pandemic. But she made the squad and is still cheering. “I think my favorite part of cheer is sideline cheering. I like performing and getting the crowd involved,” said Crawley who is also a member of Delta Zeta, a rookie Bridge Camp volunteer and a mentor for the RiverHawk scholar program.

In addition to game day cheering, the RiverHawk cheer team takes part in pep rallies, as well as junior and senior days for visiting high school students. And even though she has just a couple of years under her belt at NSU, Macey is already pumped about this fall. “It’s so easy to make friends here at NSU and I’m really ecstatic because we get to finally cheer again at football games. We just won our first game in four years recently and that was so exciting to be a part of,” said Crawley.