Volleyball, Track & Field
Favorite athlete: Alyson Felix and Jalen Mills
Favorite team:Philadelphia Eagles
Favorite memory competing in sports:Singing and dancing on the bus with my team
Most embarrassing/funniest thing has happened while competing in sports: Getting hit in the face with a volleyball
Music on mobile device: PnB Rock
Future plans: Going to college, majoring in Criminal Justice
Words to live by: “Don’t announce your moves until they’ve already been complete.”
One goal before turning 30: Have my master’s degree
One thing people don’t know about me: I used to play the violin
By Mary Jane Souder
Tiera Lloyd has had success during her track and field career at Harry S Truman. The senior gave a glimpse of her natural athletic ability when – as a freshman sprinter – she competed in the long jump for the first time at an invitational midway through the season.
“I never did long jump a day in my life, and I was really scared, but I got first place at that meet,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd’s track career changed directions immediately and, instead of sprints, the Truman senior focused her energy on long and triple jumps.
“She’s been improving year after year,” coach Mike Henderson said. “We’re expecting some very good things out of her this year to build off of her success last year.”
Lloyd, however, is one of those special athletes whose value cannot be measured by the number of wins or points she accumulates.
“She epitomizes what being a student-athlete is all about,” Henderson said. “I use her as an example for a lot of different things, not necessarily as far as being the best athlete or being the most talented but as far as being one of the hardest workers and just being a good role model.
“She’s very good at following directions, she’s a fast learner, she’s a positive influence, she’s very upbeat, and she’s always in a good mood. Those are some of the intangibles that you wish you could take out of her and just distribute them throughout the team. She’s definitely a leader, and she’s taught me a lot about coaching girls over the years. Tiera is going to be the one that’s going to hit me the hardest when she’s done at the end of the year.”
Henderson isn’t alone. Lloyd is such an integral part of the fabric of the Truman community that teachers and coaches would like to keep her around forever.
“If I could have a Tiera every year – she’s such a positive thing,” Truman drama instructor Tracey Gatte said. “She does everything. I’m one of the senior class advisors, and she’s one of their class officers.
“She’s been a dancer in the musicals the past three years. She does volleyball, she does track, she works. It’s such a cliché, but she truly is an all around student. She really excels at everything she does. She also is one of the most well-spoken and poised females in my 19 years of teaching that I’ve had the pleasure of working with.”
It’s a remarkable legacy for a student-athlete who almost didn’t attend Truman. Lloyd, it seems, was penciled in to follow in the footsteps of her older sister, Althea, who attended Conwell Egan and is now a student at Penn State University.
“That’s where my parents wanted me to go, but I begged them to let me go to Truman, and I’m so happy that they did,” she said. “I really have tried to make the most of it. High school is pretty short and goes by fast.
“I’m leaving here in three months, so it’s going to be crazy, but I wear Truman Pride. Once a Tiger, always s a Tiger, and I will forever believe that. I won’t ever have anything bad to say about Truman just because of the experiences I’ve had there. They’ve been so good and the people I’ve met and the teachers I’ve had. People don’t really know – it’s not about the building itself or any of that. It’s the people inside of it.”
And for those looking in from the outside, Lloyd has a message.
“I feel like people don’t really know what it’s like to be a Truman student unless you are one,” she said. “It’s so easy to talk down on Truman when you go to a different school and you have better sports equipment or your have better books or computers or whatever it may be.
“I feel as though high school is really what you make of it. There are people who don’t really enjoy their time in high school because they really never get involved, and then there’s people who enjoy their time because they make good friends along the way by getting involved in different things.
“It doesn’t have to be a sport. It can be after school like Truman Buddies, which deals with kids with disabilities. There’s a whole bunch of different things you can get involved in. I feel that’s really what determines if you have a good high school experience or if you don’t. For me, I’ve always been involved.”
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Lloyd wasted no time before getting involved when she got to Truman. As a freshman, she teamed up with a pair of classmates for a dance number that was part of the school’s talent show. A YouTube video of the routine shows a confident Lloyd – looking anything but the part of a freshman - owning the moment.
It was a performance that caught the eye of Gatte.
“I came into (theater) class after the talent show, and she came up to me and said, ‘So you’re going to try out for the musical as a dancer?’” Lloyd recalled. “I kind of just looked at her and laughed. I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to.’”
And she didn’t. At least not that year, but after watching one of her friends in the musical, Lloyd had a change of heart.
“She did so good and the dancers performed so well, and I was like, ‘I have to do this next year,’” she said.
For the past three years, Lloyd has been a dancer in the school’s musicals. It began with American Idiot when she was a sophomore, and Lloyd was hooked.
“I loved that musical so much,” she said. “I don’t know what it was. There was a lot going on in that musical. The dances were so good. It really was a lot of energy we needed to bring to the stage, and everybody was always engaging with each other. It was a fun show to perform.”
That was followed with Honeyman in Vegas and capped it with this year’s performance of Chicago. Lloyd – partial to American Idiot - admits she wasn’t sold on Gatte’s selection of Chicago.
“I really thought it was some old musical, and I was not about it at all,” she said. “She kept bringing up this dance called the ‘Cell Block Tango,’ so I watched the whole thing. ‘Cell Block Tango’ was in the beginning of the movie, and as soon as I saw it, it was hard for me to get through the rest of the movie because I kept rewinding it and watching it over and over again because I was obsessed with it.”
Lloyd was one of the main girls in the show-stopping “Cell Block Tango” number.
“She was just beautiful and loved every minute of it,” Gatte said. “Just the grace and poise physically she has from being so athletic carries over.
“All the teachers talk about it. She is just stunning to watch on stage. She’s a beautiful girl on top of everything.”
Making this year’s musical even more meaningful was knowing what Gatte went through to make it happen.
“She had a lot of trouble trying to get the school board to approve it,” Lloyd said. “Everybody that was a part of it went in wanting the same goal – to perform it was well as we could because we didn’t get approval at first, and there were a lot of people against it.
“We just really wanted to go out there and perform it to the best of our abilities and show the people we really worked hard to get this musical, so we’re going to work hard to show you what we’re really made of.”
Listening to Gatte tell it, Lloyd – a four-year theater student - was a natural.
“She excels at everything she does,” Gatte said. “It’s not – well, she’s a better dancer than she was a runner in track.
“She puts her mind to it and focuses and really shows off her talent. The grace and poise physically she has from being so athletic just carries over. All the teachers talk about it. She is just stunning to watch on stage.”
For Lloyd, it’s an experience she wouldn’t have wanted to miss.
“Being a dancer all three years, it was so good, it was just so good,” she said. “You get that feeling after you’re done dancing that you know you nailed it, and you can tell by the applause and everyone’s faces that you did good.
“It was just so much fun. I was so sad when it was over because I knew Chicago was my last musical, but I couldn’t have picked a better musical or a better cast to end it with. The cast was amazing too, and that’s really what brought it all together.”
The new CBS series “Rise,” inspired by the book Drama High and long-time Truman drama instructor Lou Volpe, has put Truman’s drama program in the national spotlight. Lloyd was part of a group of students that attended the premier of the show at Upper Darby Performing Arts High School. Damon J. Gillespie, one of the show’s main characters, as well as the writer, Jason Kaden, were at the premier.
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Dancing was actually Lloyd’s first sport. She began dancing when she was four and continued until her freshman year of high school.
“I wanted to get involved in high school sports, and when I danced, I competed and that took up a lot of my time after school and on weekends,” she said. “I just wanted to go a different way when I got in high school.”
Lloyd – a cheerleader in eighth grade - chose to try out for the volleyball team even though she had never played it before, a decision that came by default after she missed the tryouts for cheerleader.
After a year on the jayvee, she saw some varsity action as a sophomore and the past two years was a fixture at the middle of the net.
“I ended up really liking it and really gaining a lot of experience and a lot of love for the sport,” Lloyd said.
“She was a phenomenal player,” Truman coach Alex Rysak said. “She’s a really good athlete. She had a great relationship with every single girl on the team. She was a big motivator.
“My favorite part about Tiera was if something seemed difficult or if something was difficult or if something wasn’t working out for her, she wouldn’t stop there. That’s what pushed her. She’s very determined, and she knows what she wants, and she goes after it, which is awesome.”
Track had been part of Lloyd’s life since she was in seventh grade. A sprinter, she competed in the 100, 200 and 4x100 relay. Until that invitational her freshman year.
“That’s when my jumping started,” Lloyd said. “I just stuck with that.
“I didn’t like triple at first, but then I started getting better at it, and now I’m stronger in triple than I was in long jump.”
Competing in sports is just one small piece of Lloyd’s high school experience. As a junior, she travelled to Spain on a school trip.
Lloyd is a captain for Truman’s upcoming Spirit Night, an annual event that includes competition in everything from art to dance. This year’s Spirit Night will have a Disney theme.
A class officer, Lloyd is an excellent student and has taken both honors and AP classes. She plans to major in criminal justice but is undecided on a college. She has been accepted at George Mason.
“It’s not too far from D.C., and I’m looking at that mainly for my major and the internships I would have there,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd’s dream job?
“I want to work for the FBI,” she said. “I take Forensic Science, and the whole CSI type stuff – investigating and profiling, I’m really into.”
Gatte, for one, has no doubt that Lloyd will succeed.
“I’m so excited to see what she does in the future because I think it’s going to be a very positive thing,” the Truman drama teacher said.
