Abby Paprocki spent her formative years competing in gymnastics, but she had the idea for a while that she would ultimately transition to cheerleading in high school.

“I knew for a very long time that I wanted to cheer in high school,” Paprocki said. “All the movies with the cheerleaders just made me want to do it, watching ‘High School Musical’ and all that.”

She was not completely sure though until eighth grade when she attended a cheer clinic held by the St. Thomas Aquinas cheer team. 

“It was for middle schoolers that were planning to try out for the team,” Paprocki said, adding that it helped give her the first-person, hands-on experience for what cheer would offer. “All of the girls were so nice and I just love the team environment, rather than what I had been doing in gymnastics, being an individual sport. I had never been part of a team sport.”

That would lead Paprocki, the Capitol Federal® True Blue® Student of the Week, down the path of becoming a two-time state champion and two-time state runner-up with the Saints at the KSHSAA Gameday Cheer Showcase.

Paprocki said she enjoys cheering on the sidelines for other Aquinas teams, such as for the Saints football team this fall as they recently won the Class 4A football title.

“It’s a lot of fun getting the crowd involved at games and just getting to have that leadership role,” Paprocki said.

But Paprocki enjoys the cheer team competitions the most.
 

“I think competitions have a little more meaning because it’s where we get to put out all of our hard work and practice to really showcase the extent of our team’s abilities,” she said.

When Paprocki joined the Saints cheer squad, the program had already had a strong track record of performances at KSHSAA’s Gameday Cheer Showcase. The team had finished as state runner-up in the first three years of the competition heading into her freshman year in 2020.

In that first season, Paprocki got to experience being part of a team with seniors who had finished one spot away from taking home the title in every season of their high school careers. As a sophomore, it was the same thing.

Paprocki credits those state runner-up finishes, and knowing the team’s history of taking second place in the years prior to her arrival, with motivating her over the last two years.

“It made me more hungry for it,” she said. “It definitely made my work ethic better, just working a lot harder. I pushed myself every day very hard. It made me, it made us all as team, push each other because we all knew we wanted it.”

Paprocki said last year’s seniors helped get the team in the right mindset to finally break through for that first state title. Each year the seniors come up with a motto for state.

The motto for the 2022 Gameday Cheer Showcase was, “Leave no doubt.”

“We wanted to leave no doubt in the judge’s mind that we deserved to win,” she said. 
 

Aquinas proved early in the competition that that was more than just a motto. The Saints earned the top score with nearly a full 17-point advantage over St. James Academy as the next best mark.

But that strong performance to start the competition does not guarantee anything more than a top six spot as the scores reset for finals. St. James found that out the hard way as the Thunder slipped to fourth in the finals.

After hearing their fellow EKL rival get their name called early, Paprocki and the Saints might have thought they’d suffer the same fate right after KC Piper was called as the third-place team.

For the first five years of this competition, it always ended with the Saints getting their name called as second to last. During Paprocki’s two experiences with that, it was Blue Valley Southwest as the other team awaiting the public address announcer to call out those final two school names.

Finally, Blue Valley Southwest had its name called first and received their state runner-up trophy, sending the Saints into a frenzy as they knew exactly what came next, even if it was their first time experiencing it.

The Saints got the job done on the big stage, but Paprocki felt like the team’s breakthrough had much more to do with the lead-up to the event than just performing all out on that day. 

The team’s first state title really started with the coaches selecting the state squad early in the year. Paprocki said that when the coaches are selecting the state team each year, part of what they are looking for is ability, but also a slightly less tangible quality of “who wants it.”

“A big part of our score sheet is team spirit,” she said. “What (the judges) have said for years is that they can see it in your eyes. I think the five years prior, we didn’t really know how bad we wanted it. I think the year that we first won, there was just a whole different vibe and energy to that team.”
 

Paprocki said that this year’s team wanted to carry over those vibes as much as possible. But the Saints also did not want the drive to repeat to become an overwhelming focus for this team.

“Our goal (this year) was definitely to win back-to-back state championships,” she said. “But we didn’t really want to have that in our mind, in everyone’s heads. ‘Oh, we have to get this.’

“We really want state to be something where we just have a good experience for everyone, whether we win or lose.”

Instead, Paprocki and her fellow seniors decided on a different focus for this year’s motto.

“This year we came up with ‘This is it,’” Paprocki said. “The state team is a different team every year, because people leave and freshmen come in. It was the only time we would compete with this team.”

If this is it, Paprocki and her fellow seniors got a great ending. Aquinas secured its second straight state title. The Saints ended the qualifying round trailing Shawnee Heights for the top spot, but ultimately earned a 91.65 score to become back-to-back champs. Piper took state runner-up while Shawnee Heights slipped to third.

Other teams end up competing in other national competitions, but the Saints have not participated in many of those since the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, the KSHSAA Gameday Cheer Showcase sits as the team’s only major competitive outing for each of the seasons of Paprocki’s high school career.

“If we did decide to go to that (nationals), I would obviously try to be on that team,” she said.

Even if that’s not in the cards, Paprocki will keep enjoying the non-competitive cheer performances during her senior year. One part of that was the team’s homecoming routine earlier this semester. For that, seniors are tasked with creating the choreography for a three-minute routine to perform at the Saints’ homecoming pep rally.

“I've been part of the routines, but this was my first year being a part of the choreography process,” she said.

Paprocki said she enjoyed the process. They got a group together prior to the start of the school year to begin working on it. 

“We would meet up to just slowly figure out the logistics,” she said. “We’d assign each person to a different section of the routine.”

They got the routines prepared in time to start teaching them to the rest of the team as soon as practices started.

“It definitely was very time consuming, but it was time that I was willing to put into that because I was very much excited for it,” she said. “It was a lot easier than I thought it would be to balance the two.”

Paprocki has started to become fairly good at balancing multiple obligations during the same season. During the spring, Paprocki competes as a diver on the Saints swim team while also competing on the track team.

“But I also think last year I was struggling more with my time management of dive and track,” she said. 

She also had a track injury, which she sees as a big factor in her state finish for dive taking a step back from her sophomore to her junior season. Paprocki said that if she ends up continuing to compete in track this spring, she’ll probably limit herself to one event. Last year she took sixth at regionals in the long jump.
 

For diving, Paprocki has reached state each of the past three years, starting with a ninth-place finish as a freshman in 2021. She followed up with a fifth-place finish the next year. Despite posting a better final score as a junior last season, Paprocki slipped to seventh place.

“I think diving has definitely become more competitive through the years that I've done it,” she said.

She originally started diving as a freshman just to have a sport during cheer’s offseason. 

“I started with dive because my mom wanted me to try it,” she said. “She knew that I've never not been in a sport. I've always had some type of sport to do.”

Paprocki said that her skills from gymnastics and cheer helped make for an easier transition to diving.

"All the divers I know have a gymnastics or cheer background," Paprocki said. "I think that is definitely a vital thing, unless you've been diving since you were little. But a lot of the girls that do high school dive have only been diving since their freshman year."

Paprocki said diving also provides her the ability to try some things that she might not be able to in either cheer or gymnastics.

“I think the hardest part transferring over to dive was instead of learning how to land on your feet, you're more learning how to land on your head,” she said.

Once her diving campaign is over in the spring, it won’t be long before she’s off to college. Paprocki plans to attend the University of Missouri next year. She also plans to try out for the Mizzou cheer team.

“My cousin went there a few years ago and she was on the dance team,” she said. “I went to some of her games growing up and she's told me about the game day experience, how life changing and fun that was for her.”

Paprocki said she looked at other schools, but after touring Mizzou and attending one of their cheer clinics, she fell in love.

“I was like walking around campus, it just felt, I just felt like that was where I needed to be,” she said. “It's definitely a school that I thought that I wanted to cheer at.”

Paprocki said she plans to major in nutrition and exercise physiology.