This is the third piece of a six-part sports psychology series, “Gray Matter,” which explores how Ohio State athletes think. The following piece explores the trust and mental toughness embodied Mikayla Smith & Braden DeLullo, a championship pair of Buckeye cheerleaders, who competed together through the trials and triumphs of their collegiate careers. Credit: Caleb Blake | Photo Editor
This is the third piece of a six-part sports psychology series, “Gray Matter,” which explores how Ohio State athletes think. The following piece explores the trust and mental toughness embodied by Mikayla Smith and Braden DeLullo, a championship pair of Buckeye cheerleaders who competed together through the trials and triumphs of their collegiate careers.
It had been a hard few years for Mikayla Smith and Braden DeLullo. The pair had known each other since their high school days in Pennsylvania when they started working together.
DeLullo left first, heading for a new adventure at Ohio State. The distance didn’t hamper what they both knew was a shared drive that is hard to find in a cheerleading partner.
Smith drove to Columbus on the weekends, catching a glimpse of what her future would hold as a Buckeye after she graduated from high school, too.
Upon graduation, the pair said they began to work together in earnest. Some skills came easily, while perfecting others was harder. In the shadow of these physical skills, Smith and DeLullo said how they developed something more important to their sport: trust.
Things didn’t always go as planned while competing in scarlet and gray. The first year they were slated to compete at the UCA Partner Stunt competition, Smith hurt her collarbone. The second time around, DeLullos said their opening stunt didn’t go as planned, overthrowing the move that cost them any hope of placing in the competition.
After the last season ended and DeLullo graduated, their chapter together seemed to have come to an end. For all the work that went into it, it’d been a hard few years.
In the summer of 2023, after he got his degree, DeLullo said he came back to campus.
“We just stunted for fun one day. It just felt so much easier from where we left off,” Smith said. “And then from there on, it continued to be that easy.”
DeLullo knew he was coming back to Ohio State for a master’s degree in public health, but his cheer career was a more uncertain piece of the equation. The demands of graduate school loomed, he said.
The commitment seemed incompatible with the hours of practice he knew his sport would require, but DeLullo said the idea idled in the back of his mind. Once he realized that his seemingly incompatible passions could indeed complement each other, DeLullo knew he had to return to the team for another year.
“I felt like if I had anything left to give to everybody that was still there; that they deserved it from me,” he said. “And I just felt like I had more left to give it.”
When DeLullo and Smith returned to the UCA Partner Stunt competition this year and said the struggles they’d been through in the two years prior didn’t linger in their minds.
“This past year, I just felt very calm,” DeLullo said. “I had a lot of trust in both of us, that we knew the environment we were walking into. It wasn’t as daunting, and I think having that in the back of my mind made me a lot more calm and ready for it.”
Maintaining that mentality wasn’t easy. The pair explained how it was particularly difficult when they walked onto the stage at the 2024 competition, knowing their routine held a move that no one had ever attempted in the event before: a shotgun front flip.
The move was to go something like this: with Smith in midair and DeLullo’s arms locked out beneath each of her feet, he’d dip and punch, throwing her upwards. Suspended, she’d flip forward, rotating a perfect 360 degrees to ensure her feet landed exactly where they started: in each of DeLullo’s hands, his elbows bent slightly to absorb the impact of Smith’s body in motion. They’d done the move together in team routines before, but trying it in their partner stunt was uncharted territory.
Still, pulling it off wasn’t what scared either of them most about the routine. Instead, they said their nerves lay with the opening move, each of them aware of how a poor opening cost them the year before. Those fears were heightened by recency bias: just a week before the competition, at practice in the Covelli Center, Smith said they overthrew the stunt just as they had in 2023.
Rather than folding, the teammates workshopped the move over and over again, mastering it with a new technique that made the error impossible. By the time they walked out on stage at the UCA event, they knew they wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
“Once we hit that [first move], it was all just a flow — and everything just happened,” DeLullo said.
Even though the pair knew that hitting the opening stunt was the key to nailing the rest of their routine, they said celebrating the success at the moment didn’t cross either of their minds.
“One thing we talk about a lot is finding your number,” DeLullo said. “So whether that’s a one or a 10, [that number is] how excited you are, how hyped up you have to be before you do something. I’ve always found that my number is a little bit lower: I like to be a little more calm and relaxed when I go to do anything. So, getting overly excited or trying to not let the moment overtake what I’m doing is something I focused on a lot.”
Smith’s approach is similar — she finds her best performance when she takes herself out of the moment, too.
“Walking out on that mat, you can literally see your family and friends all sitting [in the front row],” she said. “I always put up an imaginary wall and block it out.”
That fortitude paid dividends. The routine was executed perfectly. If the two of them didn’t realize it, their teammates certainly did.
“Seeing [our teammates] and how excited they were for us is one of my most vivid memories of [the competition]. They were all jumping up and down, and everyone was screaming,” Smith said. “But that was definitely one of my favorite moments, just seeing how happy all my teammates were for me because ultimately, they’re the ones that helped us both get to there.”
The routine earned them a second-place finish in the national competition, but the hardware that came with it was just a bonus.
For Smith, she couldn’t have been more proud. For DeLullo, it was everything they came to do.
“We had a goal, walking into that competition. It wasn’t to win — it was to compete at our highest level possible, and that’s what we did,” DeLullo said. “In my mind, we accomplished our goal and everything else after it was just something extra. I’m happy that we placed so high, but we could have gotten seventh and that still would have been fine, because we did what we wanted to do.”
