Ruby’s day doesn’t end with gaming, group chats, or scrolling through social media like the other girls. For her, it’s a sleepy drive home on a dark highway, headlights cutting through layers of fog, eyes scanning for kangaroos as her family winds through the long stretch from training. By the time she crawls out of the car and stumbles up the back steps, it’s almost 11pm. Ruby is thirteen, lives in rural NSW, and is chasing a dream. Her dream, to stand on the mat at the 2025 Cheerleading World Championships with her teammates at ESPN Wide World of Sports, as part of Australia’s first team to win a gold medal. Each night, she drifts to sleep practicing box-breathing, her dreams full of manifestation.
For Ruby, cheerleading is more than flips, stunts, glitz, glamour, bows, and lashes. It’s the heartbeat of her week, the force that pulls her across paddocks and highways into a world of hard work, pounding music, and relentless discipline. Her coaches see raw talent, but what they also see is drive. The kind that pushes a teenager to spend more hours in the car than at home, just to learn from the best.
Talent alone doesn’t fuel a three-hour round trip, multiple times a week. That requires parents who are just as committed. Ruby’s mum and dad have become part-time chauffeurs, timekeepers, and cheerleaders of a different kind. Their evenings are swallowed by the road, their weekends spent ferrying her between training sessions and competitions. Every kilometre costs money, every session chips away at the family budget. The fuel, coaching fees, uniforms, competition travel. It adds up to thousands of dollars, the kind of sacrifice most city families never have to consider.
Still, they don’t complain. They speak instead of the pride of watching Ruby fly, not just in the air during a stunt, but toward a dream no girl from their town has ever touched. They talk about the resilience she’s building, the lessons in discipline and sacrifice that will outlast any medal. And they admit a quiet fear. A fear that without the endless hours, the long drives, the stretched paychecks, Ruby’s dream might have stayed just that. After all, rural kids don’t usually become World Champions.
Ruby knows the drive is tough, but she doesn’t see it as a burden. Every trip is a step closer to the world stage. On nights when the road feels endless, she replays competition videos on her phone, visualising herself under the bright lights in Florida, representing not just her team, but every girl who’s been told her postcode is a barrier to success.
At school, her friends talk about part-time jobs or weekend parties, but Ruby’s world is different. Her calendar is built around training, conditioning, and competitions. While others sleep in, she’s stretching, running, or practising jumps in the backyard. It’s not always easy. There are sacrifices, missed social events, early morning alarm clocks and nights of sheer exhaustion. Yet she never loses sight of the dream.
Her parents see it too. They see the spark in her eyes after a tough session, the pride in her voice when she nails a routine, the determination that grows stronger every time the odds seem stacked against her. For them, the long drives, the cost, the rearranged schedules are worth it. Because Ruby isn’t just chasing a medal. She's proving to herself, and to anyone watching, that a rural girl can dream just as big as anyone in the city, and work even harder to get there.
And as 2025 draws closer, Ruby’s name is already being whispered with pride in her community. In a small town where opportunities can feel out of reach, her story has become something bigger.
A symbol of what’s possible when talent meets tenacity. Win or lose, when Ruby steps onto the mat at the Cheerleading Worlds, she will carry not just her own dream, but the hopes of every rural girl who’s ever wondered if the road to the top was too far to travel.
“And your 2025 Senior All Girl Level 5 World Champions are… EOD Allstars Pink Panthers.”
Ruby has done it. No longer a dream. Rural girl turns dreams into reality.