HERNANDO COUNTY, Fla. — Old photos bring back lots of memories for Shannon Herod, coach of the Springstead High School cheer team.

“I look at that like, who thought this was a good idea?" she said while looking at her old cheering photos.

She says most of the memories are good, but others, not so much. 

Shannon recalls the moment her cheering days took a turn for the worse. 

“My base, actually broke her hand during the stunt," she told Spectrum Sport 360's Katya Guillaume. "Her hand was already injured, it wasn’t communicated, I was up in the air and by a simple motion of her wrist, her wrist actually broke during that moment.

"She lost grip and my back spot didn’t catch me, so out the back of the stunt I went and hit my head on the gym floor. Again, back then we didn’t use mats.” 

She said back then that doctors told her she was OK — it wasn’t until she was becoming a mother, almost 20 years later, that she found out she was never OK. 

“My husband knows me so well and noticed that I was not myself," she said, "I wasn’t conversing and then he said, 'Are you all right?' And I said, 'Yeah, I’m good.'

"It's a little too real," she added. "So, like, it doesn't matter how many times to tell a story, it's probably one of the scariest times of my life.”

Doctors later discovered that she did suffer a brain injury from that fall, and going untreated for so long, the injury formed a lesion on her brain.

“Thankfully, where it was located, it wasn’t deep in the brain," Shannon said. "Things like that, and they were able to remove it."

After an intensive recovery process, she returned to the sport she always loved, using her story to inspire the girls and boys on her Springstead cheer team — with her biggest focus being on safety.

“We’re very big on technique and skill," Shannon said. "We're never going to put up something that maybe it's gonna go, or someone has the possibility of getting hurt or injured is not — that will never happen on our mat. We're very safe.”

Team members say Shannon is more than just the head coach, she’s their motivator

“The mindset and the confidence that she's been instilling in us from day one is just unlike no other," Vanessa Quiroz, a flyer on the team said. "I know that my freshman and sophomore year I struggled a lot with just anxiety and being really shy, and I've really come, like, to be a new person and just my growth just from being on this cheer team has been exponential.”

It’s confidence like this that team members say they hold onto when they are competing and in search of their first state title.

“Last year we went straight to states without going to semi-finals, which is like the first time anyone has ever done that at our school," Bailey Reiter, a base on the team said. "So that was really good. This year, we hope to get back to states without going to the semi-finals, and we'll see where it takes us from there.”

If the result doesn’t turn up in their favor, team members say being part of the county’s first competitive cheer team is an accomplishment within itself.

“I tell them that every parent meeting, every girl that enters our program, if I make you a better human, then I did my job,” Shannon said. 

While the girls are planning the next chapter of their lives, Shannon is doing the same — she is working to opening a cheerleading gym in Hernando County, where she can bring her skills and expertise to train inspiring cheerleaders how to excel in this sport in the safest way possible.