ownership group with the Dallas who eventually ended up buying the club. However,….

Familiar as I am with the species, I wasn’t sure I needed to watch the Netflix documentary, “America’s Sweethearts: The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders,” a peek into the lives of the 2023-2024 squad. The seven-episode series takes us from the rigorous tryouts (and heartbreaking eliminations) to the tush-kicking training and through the whole season, including a Thanksgiving spectacular featuring Dolly Parton.

My seasoned guess is that one’s experience of the documentary varies by age. While these young women seem like children to me now, I can assure you I wouldn’t have been a sympathetic witness at 22, my age when the DCC first swished onto the Cowboys’ field 50 years ago. I wouldn’t have deigned to watch a football game, much less tolerate a bunch of scantily clad cheerleaders — an anachronistic insult to the freshly liberated generation of young women to which I belonged.

Victoria Kalina had already had her heart broken once on television when she was approached about appearing in the docuseries that would become Netflix’s America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

Kalina first auditioned to become a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader when she was 18, with the process captured on CMT’s long-running reality show Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team. She was told on camera that she didn’t make the cut—a rejection that was especially crushing because, as the daughter of an ’80s Cowboys cheerleader, she spent her life dreaming of becoming a second-generation “DCC.”

It also didn’t help that the woman who decided and delivered her fate—DCC director Kelli McGonagill Finglass—was a close friend of her mother’s, someone Kalina had known since she was a child. (In America’s Sweethearts, Finglass recalls the rejection being “one of the hardest moments of my career.”)

By the time Netflix came knocking, though, Kalina had persevered—making the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader team three times. (Each DCC is required to turn in her costume at the end of the season and compete for a place on the team every year, regardless of her experience.) She had DCC experience and trusted the vision of America’s Sweethearts creator Greg Whiteley, who previously created Netflix’s Cheer and Last Chance U.

But the 2023–2024 football season, captured in the docuseries starting from the cheerleaders’ audition process to game days, was more difficult than Kalina anticipated. On top of the familiar mental and physical rigors of the job, she was competing against younger, more energetic performers. America’s Sweethearts ends with another crushing moment for Kalina, again delivered by Finglass. As the cheerleader turns in her uniform, she asks Finglass and DCC choreographer Judy Trammell about the chances of her growing into a leadership role in the 2024-2025 season: “My love and my heart and my soul are here and I want to know that it’s reciprocated.”