Southern Middle TN Today News with Tom Price 3-28-25

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Southern Middle Tennessee Today

News Copy for March 28, 2025

All news stories are aggregated from various sources and modified for time and content. Original sources are cited.

We start with local news…

Spring Hill’s Food Truck Policy Discussed (CDH)

The Spring Hill Board of Mayor and Aldermen is discussing a potential amendment to the city's food truck policies, and whether such businesses should be allowed to operate on public property.

Earlier this month, the topic was brought before the board as a discussion item and presented jointly by public works and parks and recreation.

Unless a temporary use permit is approved by the city, public property cannot be used for personal gain and that includes mobile businesses benefiting financially, according to Spring Hill's municipal code.

"Unfortunately, development services has erroneously issued temporary use permits for food trucks to operate in a city park and did so without knowing the property owner must authorize someone to conduct a business on their property," Spring Hill Development Director Dara Sanders said, noting the municipal code requirement had been overlooked.

Initial feedback from board members was to uphold the current municipal code, which would allow for an "invitation only" type of scenario when issuing special events permits. It also aligns with similar policies in neighboring communities.

"I was in support of allowing this until I went to every single one of our neighboring communities and they don't allow it," Alderman Vincent Fuqua said. "I think we ought to be consistent."

Alderman Jason Cox agreed. He said allowing food trucks on public property could lower funds generated by onsite concession stands, which benefit many of the local sports teams.

"I've been on the Hawks board, and clearly that concession stand is huge for that board and those kids," Cox said. "I've also been a parent with the Lions Club tee-ball, and the kids love running up to that concession stand. They get a little ticket at the end and love running up there, and I wouldn't be in favor of undercutting that."

Parks & Recreation Director Kayce Williams said the city is required to undergo a special permitting process for special events.

"I obtain a special events permit through Development Services," Williams said. "That entire checklist of questions covers all of those bases, which trucks are going to be there, that they get inspected the day of the event, the whole nine yards."

Alderman Matt Fitterer suggested the city require a special events permit, rather than a temporary use permit, saying "It sounds like the most responsible path forward to me."

"I don't want to put Development Services or the BOMA in a position where they have to pick who can play and pick who can't," Fitterer said. "I think that would be inherently unfair."

Williams said the "invitation only" aspect would be in regard to city special event planning, such as an open call for food trucks to be included as part of future city gatherings, rather than specific trucks chosen at will.

"It all boils down to who will say 'Yes' to me for each event and who will return phone calls," Williams said.

Alderman Kevin Gavigan concluded the discussion by saying an open call method could be considered the "most fair treatment."

"Whether it's first come, first serve, or we put out the invitation at midnight and the first to respond is at 12:01 a.m.," Gavigan said. "Even a lottery system would be fairer than picking or choosing."

No formal decisions were made during the March 17 board meeting.

CHS Cheer Take Nationals (MSM)

How did a newly minted English teacher, who hesitated to accept a coaching position that no one wanted, take a competitive cheer team that didn’t exist in 2021, from a region whose teams had never before advanced beyond the national preliminaries, to a narrow second and then first place in the UCA National Cheerleading Championships?

It’s simple, says coach Bari Staggs: committed athletes and lots of practice.

Staggs took an interim job at Mt. Pleasant High School in 2021, at the height of the COVID pandemic, when her friend Jennifer Burgett brought her some news. The cheerleaders at Columbia Central High School had been asking the school to set up a competition cheer team, but neither of the current coaches wanted to lead one; they would only commit to leading cheer at sports games, not the more demanding competitive cheer.

Burgett, a cheer mom and career nurse, was willing to coach competition if no one else would, but first she suggested that Staggs, as a cheerleader of many years, apply to Columbia Central to be the new competition coach.

“I’m just starting out teaching, I don’t know if I want to go,” Staggs said she thought to herself at the time. “Central’s huge, that’s going in with the sharks. I just want to get my feet wet!” But as a lifelong cheerleader who understood what the sport entailed, she ultimately applied to be an English teacher and was also accepted as the coach for the 2022-23 season.

“She was not sure that was the path she wanted, but [she] jumped right in!” said Burgett, who became the assistant coach that year.

“We’re gonna get a bid at our first regional,” Staggs told the cheerleaders and their parents in their first meeting in August, “so y’all need to decide right now if y’all want to go to nationals.”

The parents laughed out loud, then agreed conditionally – if they placed in the top three regionally and got an offer to go to the national tournament, they would take it. But she reaffirmed, “We’re gonna get a bid.”

To start placing at the regional level, let alone the national, Staggs said she “had to build the culture up” that was lost during the shutdowns, in which cheerleaders began again to value hard work, daily practice and cheer as a top priority. The cheer season lasts year-round, for one thing. This year, because Staggs is taking a short break to support her daughter during her softball season, the cheer team will train from April 2025 to February 2026. In the summers they practice three times per week, four in the winter; when school is in session, they drill every day and they lengthen their sessions as competitions draw nigh. Staggs directs every session and Burgett attends as many as she can.

What they do in those sessions is perform their cheer routines at full steam, as though they were doing them in competition. From May to November, they spend half of their eight weekly cheerleading hours on sideline, game-cheer routines; after that they focus 100 percent on the competitive cheer routines. The benefits of this, Staggs says, are undeniable for the cheerleaders.

“I have this philosophy, that was bred into me [by] my coaches in high school… that you go full-out a lot,” she stated. “Most every other coach I know, they go full-out at their practices maybe three times; we have [done so] as many as 17 times [in one session].

“It’s all muscle memory. If you can do it when you’re tired… sore… [or] hurting, you can do it anytime,” she explained. “And that also builds your confidence level. [You think,] ‘Last week, I wasn’t at 100 percent but I still [went full-out] this many times; then when I’m at 100 percent, look what I can do.'”

“When we go out there on the floor, our body knows exactly what to do,” confirmed co-captain Morgan Anderson. “We can work when we’re tired, and in the end we can really push through it.”

Staggs’s coaching strategy hasn’t changed with the years, it’s only intensified. They start by going full-out once per practice and end the year doing 10 or more runs-though in a session.

The young women on the cheer team are no less champions than their coach, demonstrating grit and leadership qualities beyond their years. Co-captains Morgan Anderson (a “flier” who gets tossed in the air during routines) and Kate Endsley (a “base” on whom the more delicate cheerleaders stand) spoke like experts and carried themselves like leaders during the interview with Main Street Maury. They were high-performing sophomores when Staggs took on the team in 2022.

The Central team went to the regional cheer competition that school year, challenging teams from Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi, and Burgett organized the first of many competition trips. In their first year they pulled third place, an accomplishment which blew away the Central cheerleaders and their parents.

“You would’ve thought we had won the national title right there,” said Staggs. “They were so excited.”

Teams qualify for the national tournament by scoring 90/100 or better at the regional. They travel to the Wide World of Sports facility at Disney World in Orlando, Fla., to compete in the preliminaries against 20,000 other cheerleaders from across the county. The top half of teams in each prelim division advance to the semifinals, except for the very top performers who advance straight to the finals.

Other high school teams in the area (Staggs mentioned Central, Spring Hill, Lawrence County and Columbia Academy) have gone to the national preliminaries, but the coach believes that Columbia Central’s 2023 squad was the first team from southern Middle Tennessee to advance beyond the prelims – certainly the first in the school’s history. In their first year the Central team placed 12th and returned to Columbia with new horizons in view, to work up to the national podium.

“Every coach knows it exists: something tragic always happens in January,” Staggs said of the famous “January curse” that hit the team the next year. They overcame the week-long bite that the January 2024 cold snap took out of their “crunch time” practice schedule, as well as a case of mononucleosis that one of their leading seniors recovered from just in time for the national competition, to land the second-place national spot. Numerically it was a huge improvement over 12th place, but it caused the team more heartburn than joy: partly because they lost the first-place slot by only two points, but mostly because of what it symbolized.

“If you’ve ever gotten second, that’s heartbreaking,” said Staggs. “We had come so far, but getting second [means] you’re so close, but you still don’t have it… It’s gut-wrenching.”

“We didn’t even want to accept the award [when] they called out ‘second place’… because we set our goals so high that that just felt like the biggest let-down,” recalled Anderson.

“We know we do a lot more than most teams do, so having to lose by two points, knowing that we probably did more, was really hard for us,” Endsley said.

Nevertheless, the narrow loss brought things into focus for them: the top of the podium was not only open, it had their name on it. Central thundered into the 2024-25 practice season, blowing past several obstacles along the way. Nine good senior cheerleaders graduated in summer 2024, leaving a big gap in the team.

“Everybody was like, ‘How in the world are we going to replace them?'” Staggs recalled.

But fortunately, a cheer team runs on much more than the individual strengths of its personnel.

“I don’t look for cheerleaders… I look for athletes with a certain attitude,” Staggs said. “There’s some that have talent when they come in, but if they don’t, I train their athleticism into what it needs to be.”

Accordingly, she recruited her daughter and two other softball players. “I saw their work ethic on the field,” she said. “We grow our own… A star player doesn’t help you in cheer. You have to have a whole team of star players.”

“If it wasn’t for people on the team, I wouldn’t be the best version of myself,” said Anderson. “They push me to be harder, and I push them… We want what’s best for each other.”

This year, the Central team drilled hard to score 94 in their regional and advance to the preliminaries against 33 other teams. Several members were laid low by the flu in the week before nationals and they didn’t feel that they did their absolute best in the prelims, but they still got the top score in their division, so they advanced once again to the finals against 11 other teams. To improve on the preliminary performance, they held a reasonably long, but very intense practice on Saturday to prepare for the finals the next day.

Cheer competitions are score-based, like gymnastics or skating, and consequently very hold high stakes.

“You have three minutes to perform. You don’t have seven innings like in a softball game, or four quarters [like] in a basketball game or… football game,” Staggs said. “That’s where all the pressure comes from, that’s where the endless practice comes from: because you have to have intense muscle memory and focus… If you make a mistake, it’s game over… and you have to set yourself apart, so they remember you.”

They’re hard on parents too. Staggs’s own father said her own childhood cheer competitions were the most nerve-wracking sports events he’d ever attended.

“Nothing made me more nervous than coaching because I couldn’t do anything,” she testified, “and this year, having a daughter that had never cheered before, it was double[d].”

Her daughter, who has experience as a travelling high-school softball player, was crying from nerves.

Every cheerleader has to trust herself and her teammates to do the routine perfectly – hence Staggs’s emphasis on muscle memory. Dropping or throwing a pom-pom or sign in the wrong way, or stepping on one, can cost the team unaffordable points and can lead to a two-point loss like the one in 2024.

“If you get a deduction, you’re not gonna be top five,” Anderson summed it up.

“Last year we all wanted to win, but some people wanted to win more than others,” Endsley said. “As captains, we wanted to make sure everybody carried the same mind-set, because if you go into nationals without the same mind-set, you’re working against each other.”

The night before they competed, the team and their families held a cookout by the pool, like they had before the previous year’s national finals. “We decided to make it a tradition!” Burgett recalled. “[It] has turned into one of the most fun team events while at Nationals!”

The R&R was welcome, with the pressure that the competition brought the next day. Endsley said that a competition day starts with people’s pre-game “rituals,” and continues with the team leaders de-psyching the players as showtime approaches and the nerves begin to set in. Girls become hysterical, shake, and throw up as showtime approaches.

“We have to make sure everyone is calm and collected, and goes out there and does what their body knows to do,” she said.

Staggs is the first-call reassurer and hype-woman for the team, but the responsibilities of a coach take her away from her team early on competition days, well before the backstage drama begins. On game day, those jobs get delegated to co-captains Anderson and Endsley.

“It is up to these two to keep everybody else calm,” Staggs said. “They have the most important job, especially at nationals, because in those frantic minutes before they go on, they have to completely relax [every]body.”

A lot rides on the captains’ shoulders. A freshman convinced Endsley of this when she approached her the night before finals in 2025.

“She told me that if we are nervous, then everybody’s nervous… I’m nervous myself, but that really clicked in my brain that I need to not show it,” Endsley said of the freshman. “The morning of finals… once everybody left my room, and it was just me, I had to collect myself and… be in a good mood, even though I was nervous.”

“When we get backstage and everyone’s in a hectic state of mind, Kate and I bring the confidence and try to calm people down… [We] tell people, ‘You’ve got this,'” Anderson said. “We know what the feelings are like, we know how to control them. So we just use what we know and share it with them.”

They won the 2025 championship with a score of 92.4, beating the second-place team by 2.5 points – another reminder of the narrowness of their sport’s margins of victory. Staggs credited the seniors for putting on a great performance in their last year.

“They were the heart and soul of our journey, and I promised them last year that we were going to win it for them,” she said. “We wouldn’t stop until we had a title.”

After the national win, Anderson and Endsley are focusing on their schoolwork to ward off “senior-itis.” They’ve had to monitor and motivate one another in areas outside of cheer, especially academics: they both belong to Collegiate Academy and dual-enroll at Columbia State, and they presented their Capstone projects last week.

Endsley’s project raises awareness for farmland preservation in Tennessee. She interned with the Farm Bureau for it under Vice President Brian Wright, and read the work of Scott Cepicky and Charlie Martinez for research.

Anderson’s Capstone project investigates therapeutic uses of certain kinds of targeted radiation (partly inspired by Mr. Staggs’ fight with cancer), which she finds “intriguing” but doesn’t want to major or work in.

“I’m not a hands-on clinical person,” she said. “I love data analysis.”

Both are also planning to hang up the pom-poms after this season. Endsley would’ve liked to continue cheering, which she’s done since kindergarten, but apparently it’s not to be. In her sophomore year she developed “positive J-shaped curves” in both her kneecaps, causing pain during and after exercise. During the season she had to wear double knee braces at practice, which she took off and threw a few times because of the frustration and pain she was in.

“You could literally see them shaking in the air,” Staggs said.

“I could feel them,” replied Anderson.

“[It] still is something I wish I could do,” Endsley said. “[But] I said, ‘Let’s just get through high school.”

Anderson received cheer scholarship offers from Belmont and Trevecca Nazarene, but she doesn’t plan to take them up on those: partly because she’s exhausted by doing gymnastics and cheer all her life, but mainly for one winning reason.

“I want to end on a high note. I want to end with the people I’ve been doing it with all my life, I want to end it winning,” she said.

New Exhibit at Columbia Visitor Center (Press Release)

Visit Columbia is recognizing Women in History month and kicking off Spring with an exhibit featuring local artist Lucy Thomas. This exhibit of beautiful paintings will be on display and for sale through the month of April at the Columbia Welcome Center located at 713 N. Main Street in downtown Columbia, Tennessee.

Thomas earned her degree in Theatre Arts & Music from Birmingham Southern College where she attended school on a voice scholarship. She has always considered herself a creative, but she believes she found her true purpose when she began painting in her late 40s. Thomas says “There is no greater pleasure for me than for my art to make someone smile and give an uncomplicated rush of happiness to the viewer.”

You can find out more about Lucy Thomas by visiting her online on Instagram: @lucyslifeinpictures or her website: lucyisanartist.com. The Columbia Welcome Center invites everyone to experience her exhibit during business hours Monday-Friday from 10am to 4pm, Saturday from 10am to 3pm, and Sunday noon-3pm.

And now, Your Hometown Memorials, Sponsored by Oakes & Nichols Funeral Home…

Alfred Anthony “Tony” Bradford, 78, died Wednesday, March 26, at his residence in Lewisburg surrounded by his family.

Funeral services will be conducted Saturday at 11:00 AM at Lewisburg First Baptist Church. Burial will follow in Lone Oak Cemetery. The family will visit with friends Friday from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM and Saturday from 10:00 AM until time of the services at First Baptist Church.

David C Harwell, 66, retired NASA engineer, died unexpectedly after a short illness on March 10, 2025, at his home in Huntsville, AL. A graveside service will take place at St John's, Ashwood on Saturday at 11:00 AM.

And now, news from around the state…

23 and Me Files Chapter 11 (Tennessean)

DNA testing firm 23andMe filed for bankruptcy on Sunday, and experts are warning users to take action now.

The Sunday announcement stated the genetics testing firm entered voluntary Chapter 11 restructuring and sale process. The company states it intends to continue operations as normal, with no changes to how it stores, manages or protects customer data.

23andMe is looking to "sell substantially all of its assets" and is seeking authorization from the court to do so, according to a press release. This is raising concerns with experts, who are telling customers to delete their data now rather than later if they don't want their data potentially sold to another company.

“If 23andMe goes bankrupt, these data will most likely be sold to the highest bidder, a successor company that customers might not want to entrust with their genetic data,” three law professors wrote in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

They described the issue as “a structural problem in a legal system relying heavily on privacy policies to protect consumer data, while also treating those data as a valuable asset.”

23andMe has stated that it will continue to protect its clients' data even during the bankruptcy process.

“We remain committed to our users’ privacy and to being transparent with our customers about how their data is managed,” it said. “Any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data.”

In 2023, 23andMe was hacked, reporting that "threat actors" used about 14,000 accounts to access the ancestry data of 6.9 million.

The breach resulted in a class action lawsuit and in September 2024 the company agreed to pay a $30 million settlement. Six months later, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy.

The authors of the New England Journal of Medicine article raised concerns that 23andMe reserves the right to transfer customer data in case of sale or bankruptcy, and customers can’t fully protect their data from being “accessed, sold or transferred as part of that transaction.”

They've also urged Congress to step in to help do more to shield consumer data from such corporate changes.

Can you delete your 23andMe data?

Yes, but it could be a process and not all of it might be deleted.

Tennesseans who have used 23andMe can remove personal information by opting out of the 23andMe data section of account settings. The data is deleted once a user submits and confirms the request, according to the company's website.

The company's website states that it is legally required to retain certain data, though.

"23andMe and/or our contracted genotyping laboratory will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth and sex as required for compliance with applicable legal obligations … even if you chose to delete your account," the company's privacy statement says.

Meaning your genetic information will still remain with the company.

“The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database,” wrote Jason Koebler, a co-founder of post on technology-focused 404 Media. “Once you give your genetic information to a company like 23andMe, there is no way to have any clue what is going to happen to that data, how it is going to be analyzed, how it is going to be monetized, how it is going to be protected from hackers, and who it is going to be shared with for profit.”

Final Story of the Day (Maury County Source)

The Duck River Trail Run 5k & 15k will take place along the scenic trails of Chickasaw Trace Park on Saturday, March 29th.

Chickasaw Trace Park is located at 1419 New Hwy 7 in Columbia.

Net proceeds from this event benefit Maury County Parks & Recreation and their efforts to continue the preservation and care of Chickasaw Trace Park.

Packet pickup begins onsite at 6:45am and the run begins at 8am.

This event is rain or shine.

Pre-registration: $27 for 5K | $32 for 15K

*price increase to $35 for 5K and $40 for 15K on event day

Register: www.duckrivertrailrun.com