Elizabeth Baldridge has learned to practice wherever the baton can go up without hitting something on the way down.

A church gym works. So does an elementary school. A tennis court will do in a pinch. During the pandemic, she and her teammates practiced outside on a soccer field, wearing masks. That patchwork training ground is where the Mt. Lebanon twirler built the routines that took her this summer to the University of Notre Dame and a win in the 2026 America’s Youth on Parade Pre-Teen Beginner National Pageant.

Getting there took most of a year.

Baldridge, a seventh-grader at Mellon Middle School and a Navahoe Drive resident, begins learning new routines around the start of the school year in private lessons with her coach, LeAnn Chamberlin, director of Bethel Park-based Passion Twirl and Poms and herself a world title holder. By March, she  is competing locally, using judges’ scores and comments to figure out what needs work.

In May, Baldridge placed third at the Miss Majorette of Pennsylvania competition. Her next shot at qualifying for the national pageant came in June at the North Atlantic Regional competition at Penn State, where she won her regional pageant title.

Baldridge was often up at 7 a.m. and in a gym by 8, practicing at least five days a week. Some days she returned for an evening session. Some of those gyms had no air conditioning. And sometimes, there was no coach standing beside her.

Baldridge sets up her phone, records herself and watches the footage with a judge’s eye.

“I check to see if my legs are straight during leaps,” she says. “Or if I drop a trick, I try to figure out why and correct it.”

It is a long way from how casually twirling entered her life.

Elizabeth was 6 and taking karate when her mother, Tricia Baldridge, spotted a twirling class in Bethel Park. She offered her daughter a choice: stick with karate or try something new. Elizabeth tried the baton. She liked, in part, that almost nobody else she knew did it. “Nobody at my school really gets it,” she says. While her classmates gravitated toward familiar school sports, Elizabeth had what she calls “my own little sport.”

Elizabeth spent her early years twirling with a team before competing individually about two years ago. With that came harder tricks, higher tosses and the inevitable drops.

A drop costs points. Letting it ruin the next trick costs more. Elizabeth remembers practices when one mistake snowballed until she had dropped the baton as many as 14 times. She eventually learned to shake it off.

“It’s just a drop,” she tells herself. “You need to recover. Find the routine again. Keep moving.”

At Notre Dame, that sense of composure mattered as much as the baton. The national pageant tests competitors across three events: solo twirling; modeling and an interview with a judge; and strutting, a mix of dance and precision marching performed to the same music, with every step expected to land on beat.

“The most difficult part for me was the interview,” she said. ”You can either connect with a judge, or they might not really connect with you.”

She certainly didn’t arrive expecting to win. She looked around at the other competitors and saw girls she considered more flexible and more accomplished, she says.  “You never know how one judge is going to think from the next,” Elizabeth says. A routine that feels terrific from inside does not necessarily look the same from the judges’ table.

Then the results began coming in. The top 10 in each event were announced from 10th place down. Elizabeth took second in modeling and interview.

That was when Tricia’s expectations shifted. “I didn’t expect her to place in the modeling portion,” she says. “So when they announced her name in second place, I realized she had a shot at the national title.”

Elizabeth then took first in strutting and sixth in twirling.

Finally came the overall pageant standings. “I kept expecting them to say my name before they got down to first. I was really shocked,” Elizabeth says. “You can’t tell on my face because I was staying calm, but on the inside I was screaming.”

Now comes another climb. Elizabeth moves into the Intermediate division next year and is already working on four spins and double illusions. She hopes eventually to win the national pageant at that level, too.

Most of her friends have barely seen her twirl. She performs in a local Memorial Day parade, and occasionally a classmate or friend catches sight of her. “‘Whoa, I just saw you twirling,’” she recalls friends telling her. “‘That’s really cool. I didn’t know you could do that.’”