Surrounded by friends and family last Wednesday in the Powell High School library, senior Kathryn Brence signed her Letter of Intent to continue her academic and cheerleading career at Dickinson State University, an NAIA institution in Dickinson, North Dakota.

Going to Dickinson had been an academic goal for several years, with cheerleading for the Blue Hawks coming as an added bonus.

“I think last year is when I started looking into Dickinson,” Brence said. “I had applied to the University of Wyoming as an option but it wasn’t really part of the decision.”

Prior to being accepted into Dickinson, she said she had expressed interest in cheering at the college level, and getting accepted into the North Dakota school helped accelerate the process.

“I reached out to them [Dickinson] and told them I was interested while filling out all the forms,” Brence said. “After I got accepted, it really accelerated the process.”

Being recruited to cheer at Dickinson was a primarily online process, Brence said, and involved sending footage of her abilities to the institution before being accepted into the program.

“They don’t have an audition process. I reached out to them over social media and then they asked me to send videos of my skills. I then went on a college tour where I got to practice and meet the coaches and that is when I was added onto the team,” Brence said.

Cheer has been a part of Brence’s life since she joined the middle school program, as she has continued to grow with a Powell High School program that brought home a trophy at the 2023 state competition and improved its score in 2024.

“When I started cheering I had no idea I was going to like it as much. I started in middle school and I started two weeks after the fact because I wasn’t going to do it at all, then my friends convinced me to join it,” Brence said.

Moving into cheerleading served as a method of branching out, as it was a sport she had gone into apart from her quadruplet sisters Baylee, Charlee and Emma, although Emma eventually joined her in the sport later in high school.

“It was the one sport I had that was my own instead of swimming with my siblings,” she said. “Junior year I finally convinced Emma to join me and it became something we did together.”

Throughout her high school career she said she has continued to grow with the help of her coaches.

“They have been amazing,” Brence said. “They really saw something in me and they helped me push and gave me a great foundation of skills. They really helped my love for the sport grow.”

In her academic career, she eyed Dickinson due to classes that will help push her to become a crop adviser in the future.

“I will go into soil science and then not necessarily the research part of agronomy but more helping farmers,” Brence said.

Branching out on her own, Brence will be the only of the four quadruplets attending Dickinson State, heading into an exciting, but completely new experience nearly six hours away from Powell.

“It’s exciting, I get to experience something new,” Brence said. “I am really happy about it. It’s a little bit scary because I’ve never been apart from them but college itself is a new and scary thing to do.”