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.”

The women respond by telling Kalina that she would be lucky to make the team again considering how she performed last season, let alone become one of its leaders.

That conversation took place in February of this year. And after a weekend of consideration with her mother, Tina, Kalina decided she was done auditioning for the organization. Within five months, she left the state of Texas, the safety of her family home, and the DCC cocoon she was born into to brave it in New York City alone, pursuing her other lifelong dancing dream of joining the Rockettes.

So when Kalina binge-watched America’s Sweethearts earlier this month, that gut punch of a scene was “heartbreaking” to relive. But it was also incredible to watch it from her new home, where she’s training for her new goal.

“Just because my journey wasn’t what I expected or wanted it to be, or because it stopped at a different time than I wanted, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t fantastic,” Kalina tells me over Zoom this week. She is no longer sitting in the girly, DCC-festooned bedroom where she did her Sweethearts interviews, but in a New York City sublet still stacked with storage containers. “I’m still DCC’s number one fan,” says Kalina, wearing a pink tank top, her blonde hair in a ponytail, and a big smile.

Though she’s only been in New York for about a week, she’s already begun training with a precision dance coach in anticipation of the Rockettes’ 2025 auditions next spring. “I didn’t want to [lose my] momentum,” she explains. And the change in Kalina since she returned her cowgirl boots seems immediate: “Everyone has seen or commented on a different glow that New York has put on me.”

While the dancer struggled to connect with other DCCs in real life, her vulnerability struck such a chord with America’s Sweethearts viewers that she is the breakout star of the series. She didn’t plan to speak about such difficult subjects on camera, but ended up sharing how the pressure she put on herself to fit into those tiny white shorts drove her to an eating disorder. It was a secret she hadn’t felt comfortable sharing with many of the DCCs. “I never wanted to bring it up because I feel like it’s such a conversation bomber,” she says, “so I never allowed it to come up unless it organically happened.”

But what makes for a “good” Dallas Cowboys cheerleader doesn’t necessarily make for good TV. As one DCC puts it harshly, about 80 seconds into the docuseries, “You don’t make the cheerleading team for being yourself.” Another says, “Our job is to make other people happy. No matter what we feel.” When Whitely showed up, though, Kalina says he gave her a different directive. “He wanted us to really be our whole selves, so that was my goal,” Kalina says. “I just thought, if that doesn’t resonate, if he doesn’t feel the connection, he won’t keep filming me.”

During initial conversations with Whitely, Kalina felt so comfortable she had a hard time not raising the subject of her eating disorder. “It is a big struggle that I’m going to probably always have to battle. So it’s always been close to the surface,” she says. Sharing the secret “was almost a therapeutic release because it’s such a deep thing that I try to hide. But it’s a part of who I am, and it’s a part of what I struggle with. So it’s almost rougher hiding it rather than just being open and honest about it.”

The docuseries shows Finglass critiquing cheerleaders’ appearances in devastating detail—physique, smile, hair, costume fit, who needs a makeover—even going so far as to zoom in on game-day photographs to examine the makeup application of each cheerleader. (She calls Kalina over to lecture her on her mascara application.) But the dancer only blames herself for the pressure she feels “to look and feel good in the outfit. Those outfits are so small, and the shorts are so tiny, we have a running joke about [them] being baby clothes.”

Her eating disorder worsened during the COVID lockdown, when Kalina was deprived of her therapeutic escapes to the dance room. “That was when it got really bad and really serious,” she says. It’s why she took a gap year during her DCC term, and why she started seeing a therapist once and sometimes twice a week. “She helped me find exercises or techniques that guided me to finding that strength within.”

Kalina also credits her mother Tina—a bubbly blonde who’s perennially wearing pink or sparkly Cowboys gear—for helping her recover. On the docuseries, Tina is almost always by Kalina’s side. She is shown dutifully massaging her daughter’s muscles after training, cheering her on at dance practice, fixing her dinner, and filming her TikToks. When Kalina was in recovery, once restaurants reopened, Kalina and her mother made a point of going out to eat once a week. “I would get so anxious just ordering [something] that wasn’t part of my daily routine or what I didn’t think was right for my diet,” says Kalina. “She was like, ‘We’re going to talk through it.’ At some points if I wanted to go up and leave the restaurant, she would go with me. There was no fight, no hesitation—we were just working through that process together.”

Tina felt so much of her daughter’s pain during the 2023–2024 season that Kalina says her mother has not watched America’s Sweethearts, and probably will not anytime soon. Given how emotionally loaded the season was, I ask Kalina about the complicated nature of her and her mother’s relationship with Finglass—the DCC director who Tina refers to as a best friend and soulmate. After all, internet strangers have taken such offense to Finglass’s treatment of Kalina that there is a Reddit thread and TikToks dedicated to her perceived cruelty.

Speaking about Finglass, Kalina says, “She’s my mom’s best friend, and I am best friends with her daughter, and that is not going to change.” She downplays the tension, likening the dynamic to any coworking family members or friends trying to keep their personal and professional lives separate: “I think that’s hard for anyone, and I think we maneuvered through it as best as we could. Ultimately she has a job as the DCC director. I have a job as a cheerleader and that does need to be separated, but I don’t think it’s going to affect our family friendship outside of it.”

One reason why the DCC audition process is so competitive and cutthroat, the organization explains in the docuseries, is because it is not just choosing dancers, but ambassadors to represent the brand globally. And even though Kalina is now off the DCC roster, the second-generation cheerleader has been indoctrinated in Dallas Cowboys beliefs since birth. She won’t say anything negative about the $9 billion business, the people who run it, or the cheerleaders’ comparatively paltry pay. (In 2022, NBC Boston reported that DCCs make about $500 per game and $15 to $20 per hour for practices, totaling $75,000 per year. The lowest-paid Dallas Cowboys player, meanwhile, makes about $830,000 per year while the highest paid, quarterback Dak Prescott, has a contract worth about $160 million.)

On the series, Cowboys owner Charlotte Jones claims that the cheerleaders “don’t actually come here for the money. They come here for something that’s actually bigger than that, to them.” Kalina, too, defends the organization: “A lot of people are very hyper-focused on how little we get paid, but they also are not seeing the other side. We do get paid on game days. We get paid with sponsorships, so we don’t have to pay for getting our hair colored or our haircuts. We don’t have to pay for our spray tans. We get compensated in that aspect.” Kalina says there has been improvement: “When my mom cheered, they got next to nothing. So I think it’s just going to be a small process of change. It’s just not happening at the pace that others want to see it.”

Now that she’s living on her own, though, Kalina has to make enough to afford New York rent. So in addition to training for the Rockettes, she says, “I’m also taking auditions for any other Broadway shows that are out there, any other Christmas holiday shows that need dancers.” She’s been adjusting to the city and life away from Tina—FaceTiming her when she’s wandering the streets or waiting for clothes to dry at the laundromat.

Though she’s heard from a surge of strangers who viewed America’s Sweethearts, Kalina says she hasn’t heard from Finglass or any of her fellow DCCs since the show premiered. “But it goes both ways. Just as I haven’t heard from them, I haven’t done my part either in reaching out to see how they are,” she says. As for Finglass, “She’s so busy right now. I’m sure I’m going to hear from her. And that’s on me too. I can reach out to her.”

I ask whether she’s communicated with any Rockettes, though, and that answer is affirmative: “A lot of them have reached out to me knowing that I’ve moved out here. I think they’re going to be very inviting. Not that the DCC wasn’t,” she adds quickly. “I think my love for it shined through the whole [show], but it’s like that saying goes, ‘If you love something, you have to let it go’—especially if it’s not working out fully to either’s benefit.”