When you first became a part of our program, you had a group of individually talent athletes who weren't really sure how to use their talents together. We were in the dark. We had no idea of our potential because we couldn't even see it in ourselves yet. We weren't a very successful team, maybe we weren't the worst, but we certainly were not the best, and we had already come to terms with the fact that we never would be.

"A good coach will make his players see what they can be rather than what they are"- Ara Parasheghian

From day one, you tried every single day to instill confidence in us. You reminded us constantly that we would never be successful if we weren't confident in our own abilities. Despite your best efforts, we weren't quite ready to feel confident. Other teams around us were always better than us and it was hard to believe that we could ever be good enough to compete with them. You tried to tell us how good we could be and how much potential we had, but we were still blind to it. But our inability to see our own potential never stopped you.

"I don't coach average people" is what you would tell us, and we would laugh because average was exactly what we felt we were. Despite our lack of confidence, as our progress continued throughout the beginning of our season, we started to have a little bit of faith that maybe we weren't so average. You were determined to make us not only a great team, but to make us one of the best. You wanted to prove to everyone including ourselves that our program could, and would be, one of the best in the country.

By the end of the season, you did what takes most coaches years to do. Your love for our team and program lead us to success and you made us one of the best teams in the nation, just like you said you would. We could hardly believe it ourselves. It took seeing our own success to unfold right before our eyes to realize how right you were all along.

Any coach can walk into a successful program and continue to help that team win year after year. But it takes a certain type of coach to build a program from the ground up. An amazing coach isn't only measured by the amount of wins their team has, but by how far the team has come. Without having you as our coach, we would still be the average team that nobody even bothered to look out for. You not only built an incredible reputation as a great coach, but you truly built our program. Our success is owed to you for not only making us a great team, but for always believing in us even when we weren't.

With Love,

Your Athlete.

Special shout out to UMass Cheer Head Coach, Colby Hall, for never giving up on us and making us the best team the program has ever had "Ain't no mountain high enough"