Just before the start of her freshman year of high school, River Ridge cheerleader Madi Fawcett tore her ACL during a cheerleader competition.

“Just looking at that, it’s like a lot of frustration. A lot of, over the months of doing this, a lot of doubting myself,” she said while looking at some pictures and videos on her phone. 

The videos remind her of when she was in her prime, an elite gymnast competing on an all-star cheer team, and on a different mat as a black belt in taekwondo — that actually wasn’t that long ago. 

“At that point," Madi said, "I believed in myself a lot. I believed that I was gonna go to a D1 gym, I was gonna go to worlds, I was gonna win worlds and everything. I had a good mindset.”

That good mindset changed after her last competition day. 

She told Bay News 9's Katya Guillaume, “I landed and then I heard a snap, I heard like a tear. The tear I think it’s like right here. They got me up, they brought me to the medic area, and then they told me that my knee was fine and that they didn’t think it was my ACL out anything and they were like, 'I think you’re fine enough to go back out and compete.'”

She went back, but she wasn’t fine.

Madi said her biggest hope was that she wouldn’t need surgery, but the cheer star wasn’t out of the woods.

“There’s degrees of tearing and mine was completely torn, so I needed surgery,” she explained. 

It’s been a while now, but this summer is dedicated to getting stronger.

“So everything that’s like hard-working, pushing, getting back up and everything, that’s worth it to me because I get to move on and progress and go back to what I want to,” Madi.

She’s on a mission, to compete on the Royal Knights JV cheer team, back to her all-star team, and excel in taekwondo.

“Not doing what I love to do is like breaking for me, it just makes me sad,” Madi.

She credits her strong recovery to Eric and his team at PT Solutions. 

She said, “When I first started, I was doing leg extensions on that and I could only do like 20 and then 60 on my left. It was a big difference and then Eric pushed me, he was like I want you to do 60 on your right too. It made me gain trust back in my leg, so I was like, 'Maybe my leg is not as bad as I thought it was.'”

Hard work here, pays off on the mat. Madi said it wasn’t easy but the work she put in, will be worth it.