Na’kya McCann began cheerleading when she was 8 years old, “just two little pigtails, two puff balls,” she says. She loved the sport so much that she eventually became a teen coach in her hometown on the East Side of Buffalo, New York. She trained a group of other little girls, mostly Black like her. “Whether it was our cheer coaches protecting us, or our moms protecting us, we knew that we were safe from anything,” she says. Then one day, a white man “came to our community and shot our people.” He drove three hours to the Tops supermarket in her neighborhood—because it was a mostly Black neighborhood. He gunned down and killed 10 people, all of them Black. Just a few blocks from their gym. And that’s when Na’kya’s life changed, along with the lives of everyone she knew in Buffalo.
The journalists and politicians eventually left. But Na’kya, the cheer girls and their mothers decided they wouldn’t be silent. “To understand what we lost, you have to know about my little cheer gym on the East Side of Buffalo,” Na’kya tells us. With the guidance of veteran Radio Rookies reporter Marianne McCune, they decided they’d report their own stories of how their lives unfolded in the year after the massacre.
Throughout the next twelve months, NPR’s Embedded podcast documented the children and their families as they tried to process how this shooting had changed their lives. As they were grappling with the devastation, they were also preparing to compete in a sport that literally requires them to smile. They are judged not only on their athleticism and daring as they twist and flip in the air but also on the brightness of their facial expressions. “Buffalo Extreme” brings us into a community well-versed in wrapping up their emotions—from others, and sometimes themselves—to show strength to the outside world, and what happens when a tragedy makes that impossible.
This three-part series takes listeners on an intimate journey as the girls prepare for competitions and navigate their own residual trauma. We hear raw conversations between mothers and daughters, and tape from therapy sessions where children reflect on their fears. Marianne and Na’kya travel to cheer competitions where their coach debates whether to push the girls to their limits physically, when they’ve already been tested emotionally. Through the voices of cheerleaders, mothers and coaches themselves, “Buffalo Extreme” unflinchingly examines the reverberating effects of mass shootings, which now happen an average of once a week in the U.S.
