Jenna Waller always wanted to be a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader, but she waited to audition until after CMT’s long-running reality series “Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team” ended in 2021.

“Prior to the show ending, I was like, ‘I don’t think I could audition for DCC, because I don’t want to be cut on TV,’” Waller tells TODAY.com.

So, when she arrived for her first DCC audition in 2024, what surprised her wasn’t the toil — but the cameras. “America’s Sweethearts,” the Netflix series following the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders from auditions through the season, was filming its second season.

“I go into auditions and turns out, there’s a Netflix show,” she laughs, explaining that the series’ first season hadn’t been released yet.

Waller was faced with one of her biggest fears: Being cut while the cameras were rolling. Then her fears came true. “America’s Sweethearts” Season 2 captured the moment Waller was cut from training camp.

But after a year of intense training and a fresh start, the former Oklahoma University cheerleader, now 23, can officially call herself a DCC. She’s part of the 2025-2026 squad, which begins its season in September.

Chatting with TODAY.com, Waller says the “overwhelming” moment she learned she made the team was “the most joy I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

“It felt like I was watching my whole life in pictures. As soon as Charlotte announced the team, it felt like everything I had been working for my whole life just built up into that moment,” Waller continues, referring to Charlotte Jones, executive vice president of the Dallas Cowboys.

Below, Waller opens up about her path to this moment.

What’s DCC Training Camp Like? ‘Scarier’ Than It Seems

The San Diego, California, native first auditioned for the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders in 2024. She made it through the initial rounds of tryouts and claimed a coveted spot at training camp in Dallas, Texas. At training camp, cuts are made to arrive at about 36 team members.

“People always ask me, ‘Is it as scary as it seems? And I’m like, ‘It’s worse. It’s scarier. There’s more pressure,’” Waller says of training camp.

Recalling her state of mind going into training camp last year, Waller calls herself a “head case.”

“I was so in my head, just constantly in this state of anxiety,” she continues. “And then I think it just set me up to not be as successful. I couldn’t get out of my head.”

“I felt like I was always not good enough,” she adds. “Not that they were telling me that, but I just felt that way throughout the whole training camp.”

Waller says she “wasn’t performing my best” due to “nerves and emotions” her first time around, and was let go as the final women on the DCC roster were being selected.

“America’s Sweethearts” Season 2 captures the conversation DCC director Kelli Finglass broke the news to Waller.

“When I was cut, there was a moment, I think she rhetorically asked me, like, ‘Who else? There was no one else to cut.’ And I 100% agreed with that. Everybody is amazing. There’s nobody else to cut,” she says.

Describing herself as having a “growth mindset,” Waller says she “would never assume that I’m good enough to never have to improve.”

“So, immediately I told Kelly in that moment I’d be back next year,” she continues.

But she did have a limit: Waller says she would only audition twice. “To put yourself through that three times and set yourself up for potential heartbreak is really hard,” she says.

How She Prepared for Round 2

Waller considered not following through with her second audition, “just because I was going through so much mentally and emotionally.” But she was bolstered by her family, friends and the women with whom she became “so close” while auditioning.

“They just take you in. They help you through the whole training camp,” she says of the veterans on the team. “I think it’s because they know how hard it is on you as a rookie that you just form these deep bonds.”

For year two, she took a more targeted approach. While Waller had been dancing since she was 2 and had performed at the collegiate level, her DCC prep amounted to just a few specific classes the first time around.

“This year, I joined Jennifer Amburn’s pro focus program,” Waller says, referring to the DCC alum who started classes to prepare dancers for NFL and professional teams. Waller trained with Amburn twice a week — once privately, and once in classes — then did a separate DCC prep class.

The result? A completely different audition process.

“I was pleasantly surprised that I felt a lot more calm going into this training camp,” she says. “I felt at peace through the whole process this year.”

The feeling of peace without such heightened nerves allowed her to “perform so much better,” Waller adds.

“I remember waking up finals day — and finals day is scary because it’s a solo. It feels very audition-y — whereas training camp feels more like practice,” Waller explains. “I woke up finals day expecting to be all nerves, stomach in a knot, and it was just none of that. I felt so at peace and so excited and just happy to be there for the whole thing.”

Once at training camp, Waller says she had the epiphany that there were simply “healthy nerves” she’d learn to live with.

“This is never actually going to go away. Practice is scary. This team has so much pressure. There’s a certain amount of nerves that are just natural and they’re going to be there,” she says.

“And of course, there is the pressure of being cut, but I didn’t feel like my life was going to end whether I did or didn’t make the team, and I think that helped me a lot,” Waller adds.

Gearing Up for Her 1st ‘Thunderstruck’

While Waller can’t reveal whether auditions were taped or if “America’s Sweethearts” Season 3 is confirmed, she says “little things” changed this year compared to what was shown in Season 2 of the docuseries.

For example, Waller says cuts happened “a little bit earlier on this time.”

“I feel like last year the cuts seemed really scary because they didn’t happen until, I want to say, Week 3. So it was this built up anxiety,” she says, later adding, “This year, the first cut happened a little bit earlier. So I do believe that the faster the cuts happen, the better.”

Now, the athletes have entered the NFL football season. The Cowboys are already in their preseason, with their first regular season home game on the books Sept. 14 against the New York Giants.

Preparing for the upcoming season, Waller says the squad has practice every day, when they learn the rest of the routines and “game elements” not taught during training camp.

While Waller says being a collegiate cheerleader helped her, nothing can prepare her for how being on the Cowboys field will feel.

With the first game on the horizon, Waller says she’s both “nervous” and “excited” for her first “Thunderstruck” performance, the DCC’s iconic dance routine that opens every Cowboys game at AT&T Stadium.

“I am nervous for ‘Thunderstruck’ just because you need to have such high stamina, and it requires such endurance, so that part is scary,” she says. “But I’m excited. And now doing ‘Thunderstruck,’ I feel so proud to be doing it, whereas before I was scared.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com