Victoria Kalina had already had her heart broken once on television when she was approached about appearing in the docuseries that would become Netflix’s America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
Kalina first auditioned to become a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader when she was 18, with the process captured on CMT’s long-running reality show Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team. She was told on camera that she didn’t make the cut—a rejection that was crushing especially because, as the daughter of an ’80s Cowboys cheerleader, she spent her life dreaming of becoming a second-generation “DCC.”
It also didn’t help that the woman who decided and delivered her fate—DCC director Kelli McGonagill Finglass—was a close friend of her mother’s, someone Kalina had known since she was a child. (In America’s Sweethearts, Finglass recalls the rejection being “one of the hardest moments of my career.”)
By the time Netflix came knocking, though, Kalina had persevered—making the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader team three times. (Each DCC is required to turn in her costume at the end of the season and compete for a place on the team every year, regardless of her experience.) She had DCC experience and trusted the vision of America’s Sweethearts creator Greg Whiteley, who previously created Netflix’s Cheer and Last Chance U.
But the 2023–2024 football season, captured in the docuseries starting from the cheerleaders’ audition process to game days, was more difficult than Kalina anticipated. On top of the familiar mental and physical rigors of the job, she was competing against younger, more energetic performers. America’s Sweethearts ends with another crushing moment for Kalina, again delivered by Finglass. As the cheerleader turns in her uniform, she asks Finglass and DCC choreographer Judy Trammell about the chances of her growing into a leadership role in the 2024-2025 season: “My love and my heart and my soul are here and I want to know that it’s reciprocated.”
The women respond by telling Kalina that job growth isn’t a possibility. She would be lucky to even make the team again, considering how she performed last season.
That conversation took place in February of this year. And after a weekend of consideration with her mother, Tina, Kalina decided she was done auditioning for the organization. Within five months, she left the state of Texas, the safety of her family home, and the DCC cocoon she was born into to brave it in New York City alone, pursuing her other lifelong dancing dream of joining the Rockettes.
So when Kalina binge-watched America’s Sweethearts earlier this month, that gut punch of a scene was “heartbreaking” to relive. But it was also incredible to watch it from her new home, where she’s training for her new goal.
“Just because my journey wasn’t what I expected or wanted it to be, or because it stopped at a different time than I wanted, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t fantastic,” Kalina tells me over Zoom this week. She is no longer sitting in the girly, DCC-festooned bedroom where she did her Sweethearts interviews, but in a New York City sublet still stacked with storage containers. “I’m still DCC’s number one fan,” says Kalina, wearing a pink tank top, her blonde hair in a ponytail, and a big smile.