Twenty years ago I was teaching ballroom dance for the Bellevue Parks Department. As a former competitive ballroom dancer I was thrilled to be teaching something I loved. I was also coaching cheerleading at a high school, and I didn't really care for it, so I only lasted a year. The people at Bellevue Parks heard I was a cheerleading coach and talked to me about starting a beginning cheer class for younger kids. I wasn't very excited about it...my one year coaching hadn't been entirely positive. We offered the class once and it got cancelled because of low enrollment. I thought, "okay, we tried...moving on." But the Parks people wanted to try once more. They did, and the enrollment maxed out at 20 kids. And the rest, as they say, is history. We soon added Basketball Cheer Squad so we could have fun cheering for a team. The program's name started as Bellevue Dream Elite, but after a year evolved into Eastside Dream Elite to reflect that kids were coming from all over the greater Eastside to participate. We were at first invited to cheer for the Dream Hoops basketball program which is where the “Dream” part comes in our name. But the Dream Hoops program ended up getting cancelled that year, so we started cheering for the Bellevue Parks Youth Basketball League and have been cheering for them ever since. In next month’s installment…the first competition team.
