Kylie Williams did not know what to expect when she arrived at the T-Mobile Center alongside her St. Thomas Aquinas cheer squad teammates on Feb. 4.

Williams and the rest of the Saints cheerleaders were there to attend the WIN for KC Women’s Sports Awards event, which honored many Kansas high school teams in girls sports. The annual event attempts to recognize women and girls from the Kansas City area who make an impact via sports and fitness. 

Williams said the Aquinas cheer team, which clinched its third straight 5A state title during the KSHSAA Gameday Cheer Showcase back in November, found out about a month after their latest state victorythat they would be attending this event.

But Williams and her teammates did not really know what to expect. At first they just signed up knowing that it would be a day off from school.

Then they found out this year’s featured guest happened to be WNBA star Caitlin Clark.

With Clark’s star power, the event grew to be something that Williams could not have imagined. Before her team got to see Clark up on stage, Williams was already taken aback by the scope of the event.

“I don't think we expected that many people to be there,” Williams said. 

When the team headed to the stage to take their turn getting recognized for their achievements in front of the packed arena, Williams was almost in disbelief by the atmosphere.

“We're about to walk on stage and we see everyone,” she said. “We just thought it's so great that so many people acknowledged and celebrated the fact that we won state. It’s not just our parents and our friends and our community, but to be able to go out and see a huge group of people, people coming here and watching and cheering us on to be there. (It’s) so many other athletes too that really have an appreciation for working hard to win and how much work it takes.”

One of the women honored was Susan True, who received the UMBFC Charitable Foundation Lifetime Sportswoman Award. True, one of the founders of WIN for KC back in the mid-1990s, was a gymnastics coach at Washburn University in the ‘60s and ‘70s before going on to work at the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) during a time when Title IX helped expand opportunities for girls in high school sports.

Williams was captivated by True’s story.

“It was exciting to see a lot of awards given out and just to see how much (True) put into the fight for girls to have sports and to be able to do that,” she said. “It gives me some perspective and gratitude for being able to cheer, and to be on a cheer team that goes and wins state.”

While Clark and True served as continued motivation for Williams to continue her pursuits as a cheerleader and lacrosse player at Aquinas, the people who originally inspired her to compete as a student-athlete were role models from her youth. Role models who were much closer to home.
 

Williams started out competing in gymnastics when she was very young. But her interest quickly shifted when her older sister Ashley became a cheerleader. Williams, who is four years younger than her sister, immediately told their mother that she wanted to cheer as well.

“(Ashley) has always been my role model,” she said. “I just followed in her footsteps and she always pushed me to be a good athlete.”

Their age gap kept the sisters from ever competing as part of the same cheer squad, but Williams watched closely as her sister continued to elevate her skills, first as a member of the KC Cheer club teams before ultimately going on to cheer at Boston College.

As she watched her sister cheering on the sideline during nationally televised football games, Williams knew she wanted to follow in those same footsteps. But her high school cheer career would have one departure from her older sister’s path.

Ashley committed herself to competing on her club team throughout her time at Mill Valley. Williams went a different route when she decided to go cheer for her high school team, albeit at a different school.

With her last couple years of middle school coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams said the uncertainty around how schooling would be held going forward led her to consider different options for her own education.

“I've also always had faith, so it just really helped to have a Catholic school option,” she said. “My family knew a ton of family friends that had gone there and had friends who said it was really great.”

Her family knew people who attended Aquinas alumni, but Williams would need to work on making new friends who were currently enrolled there. Since she didn’t attend one of the Catholic middle schools that feeds into Aquinas, she started out her freshman year only knowing teammates on the cheer team. 

Williams, who said she always likes to be involved with things in her school and community, decided one way to connect with other students and make new friends was by running for Student Council.

“I did a speech for StuCo with like 20 other kids and I didn't make it,” she said. “But my sophomore year I went out again. Since then I've been on StuCo and I just always thought it was really fun to be involved in the community and not just through the cheer aspect in sports, but also through planning dances and fundraising drives.”

Williams said her favorite is StuCo's canned food drive.

“We get a lot of donations and then being able to go out and physically see 400 cans stacked in the back of my car and see that I'm actually making a difference. The Catholic Charities always come in and give us all the stats and tell us ‘You've helped so many families this year.” I believe we make up one-third of all schools and donations in this Kansas City area to Catholic Charities, so that's really great to be able to physically see how you're helping the community.”
 

Williams also enjoys volunteering with organizations and programs that aim to help children with intellectual and/or physical disabilities, such as Inclusion Connections in Olathe and the Miracle League of Kansas City.

Williams said her passion for working with those organizations originates from a connection close to home. A pair of very close friends of the Williamses have a daughter with Down Syndrome.

“When I was younger I used to go with her and go to Inclusion Connections with her,” she said. “She's what led me to volunteer with all those groups.”

Inclusion Connections runs a program called PawsAbilities, a skills training and job placement program that helps young adults with disabilities gain paid employment at a store which sells dog treats and other pet products.

Miracle League is an organization that helps children with disabilities participate in sports.

“Miracle League gives kids, who usually can’t be involved in their school programs, the ability to get joy from sports like I have,” she said.

Before she made new friends through her StuCo work as a sophomore, Williams branched out with another activity as a freshman. She found new role models in the upperclassmen on that year’s cheer team. In addition to leading her in cheer routines, those teammates also lead a recruiting push to get more girls to join the school’s lacrosse team.

“It’s fun, you can do it even if you’ve never played lacrosse,” Williams recalled as the seniors’ sales pitch at the time.

It wasn’t a hard sale for Williams. In addition to members of her growing friend group already being on the team, Williams already had some familiarity with the sport because her older brother Ryan played lacrosse.

Although Williams sees a much more one-to-one comparison to her sister in regards to following the same path, she said she’d be remiss if she didn’t clearly state the impact her brother has had on her as a role model.

Ryan Williams went to West Point, followed by the U.S. Army’s Ranger School.

“He's always been a very brave person and he has always had the courage and the determination to fight for things,” she said. “I feel like he always motivated me when I saw what hard things he could do. He's deployed right now and I know he can do so many hard things. I can too and he's always been encouraging to me.”
 

While she liked the idea of following in her brother’s footsteps with this choice in a new sport, Williams was still far from being a lax rat at the time.

“I really didn’t have any experience actually playing,” she said. “I guess when I was younger I probably did pass around with my brother a little bit, but it was still very new to me when I got to Aquinas.”

As somebody who competed in volleyball, soccer, swimming and slew of sports growing up, Williams was excited to give lacrosse a try.

While she kept her expectations in check for her lacrosse career, Williams had much different expectations for her cheer performances. Williams still recalls the disappointment of the team’s finish at the Gameday Showcase during her freshman campaign. 

The Saints reached the finals, but ultimately finished one point away from bringing home a third-place team trophy.

With about a dozen members of that team returning for their senior campaign the next year, the Saints had a lot of experienced cheerleaders hungry to return to state and bring home some hardware.

At the Gameday Showcase in 2022, the Saints delivered a 214.533 score in the qualifying round. No other team cracked 200, making Aquinas the heavy favorite going into the finals. Blue Valley Southwest provided a strong performance to make the final scores much closer at the end. Aquinas scored a 94.25 to stay nearly two points ahead of the Timberwolves, knocking off the reigning champs.

The Saints returned another double-digit senior class the next year as they completed the two-peat. They finished nearly three points ahead of state runner-up Piper.

Aquinas had a few less seniors this year with eight on the squad. But Williams and the rest of her senior teammates took pride in helping bring along the freshmen and sophomores who helped fill out the roster this season.

“I tried to make sure they all knew they were doing great and that if they had any questions or they needed help with anything that they could ask me,” she said. “But I always felt that leading by example was always the best.”

Williams said the team felt a lot of pressure to keep the streak going this year. But she also said she welcomes that pressure.

“Once you’ve won, you really want to win again,” she said. “It puts a lot of pressure on us, but it definitely motivates you to fight harder because you’re like, ‘I know how much work it took to win, I need to work even harder this year.’ There’s going to be more competition, but I feel like it really just motivated me.”
 

The Saints rose up to the challenge. Mirroring the team’s first state title in this run, Aquinas delivered a 203.950, giving the team a nearly 10-point advantage of the next best score, which came from Blue Valley Southwest.

In the finals, Aquinas delivered a 94.47 performance to finish more than five points ahead of Blue Valley Southwest and complete the three-peat.

Looking at how those younger teammates responded, Williams likes the chances of next year’s squad to defend its crown and try for a four-peat.

“I feel they definitely have a great chance at winning in the future,” she said. “There's so many underclassmen that got a chance. It seemed like everyone really wanted to put their all in.”

Next year’s squad will also have a new experience to build on that Williams and her fellow seniors did not have in previous years. For the first time in their four years with the program, the Saints competed in the National Cheerleading Association’s High School Nationals competition, held on Jan. 24-26 in Dallas.

Aquinas finished 11th in the finals for the division for large classification schools.

Williams said the team was happy with their performance, which largely served as a trial run as this was the first time the program had competed in this event under the current coaching staff. After the team saw the difference in scoring compared to the Gameday Showcase, the Saints ended up changing a lot of their routine between the first and second day.

“I almost had a change in every single element of the routine, which was hard to do,” she said. “But we did score better the second day. I was just very proud of the team for doing better and having all these changes. It was a really fun experience to do something new.”

A new crop of seniors will lead the way as Williams sets her sights on cheering at the next level.

Williams plans to attend Texas Christian University this fall, where she’ll also try out for the TCU cheer squad. 

Not only will she continue following in her sister’s footsteps by doing that, but attending college in Fort Worth will possibly bring the siblings closer together, literally. Her sister plans to take a job in Dallas upon graduating from Boston College this spring.
 

Williams thinks her experience seeing her sister go through the college cheer experience will help her in the tryout process and beyond.

“She's been through a lot of tryout processes, she's seen how it works on a college team with team dynamics and how it's a little different from high school,” she said. “Just having different events, knowing what it's like being on TV and what it's like traveling to games. I think I got kind of a background view of how all that works, how much fun it can really be and how much work it can also be. But it just seem like a great experience and I really want to continue in her footsteps.”

In terms of her academic pursuits, Williams plans to follow in the footsteps of not only her sister, but her brother. Both siblings also just so happened to follow in the footsteps of their father by majoring in economics in college.

Their father taught economics at West Point, serving as an influence for all of the children. 

Williams said she has always enjoyed math and business, but she did not necessarily have economics picked out as the clear direction for her academic future until she reached high school. That matched her siblings interests at the time, as both Ryan and Ashley started college with different majors selected before switching to economics later on.

As her siblings made that transition, she also gave econ a shot by taking a class for it during her first semester at Aquinas.

All the early lessons from her dad helped her quickly excel in her economic studies. Although Williams got a head start with the economics lessons at home throughout her childhood, she tried to avoid relying too heavily on her father during these high school courses.

“I mainly tried to confidently do the class by myself, completely,” she said, before adding one caveat. “I only had to ask him a couple of terms, or talk about (a few) topics. I wanted to confidently know that I can do this by myself and really enjoy it.”

Just like she did with her other pursuits, Williams took the inspiration from her role models and pulled as much knowledge from them as necessary to take a similar journey on her own. 

With the support of her family, friends and teammates, as well as all those people packed into the T-Mobile Center to celebrate the accomplishments of her and other women/girls like her, Williams is excited to see what challenges and triumphs await her down the road.