Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article used Dnea Harris’ maiden name of Robinson. It has since been updated with her married name.
Dnea Harris’s family is large, mainly because she includes the 80 kids she coaches at her cheer gym, Diamond Xtreme Allstars.
Sitting off North Reilly Road in west Fayetteville, Diamond Xtreme Allstars offers youth cheerleading programs like tumbling and stunts for children starting as young as three years old. The gym also has a club all-star team that competes across the country.
Diamond Xtreme Allstar is Harris’s way of giving back to the community, providing a space for kids to exercise and stay out of trouble. In recognition of this work, the gym was awarded one of the City of Fayetteville’s Empowering Community Safety Micro-Grant Program grants, which funds community initiatives targeted at crime reduction.
“When I think of youth crime, I think about children who have nothing to do. I think about children whose parents are constantly working. They’re home alone often, and they don’t get a lot of attention. Kids in those situations find things to get into,” Harris said. “Diamond Xtreme Allstars provides an opportunity for kids to be a part of something, to be needed.”
Elevate and inspire
In late March, Diamond Xtreme Allstars was awarded $2,500 — the second-highest amount of funding given by the city’s program. The money supports the gym’s scholarship program, Elevate and Inspire, which helps families pay for enrollment, classes, competition fees and gear like shoes and uniforms.
Cheerleading is an expensive sport, costing anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars for a season for a single athlete, depending on the team. Harris created the scholarship so that any of Fayetteville’s youth can become cheerleaders.
“We wanted to create an inclusive cheer program that was designed to remove the financial and accessibility barriers to guarantee that all kids, regardless of their background or skill level, could participate,” Harris said.
Harris said the micro-grant will support up to 20 athletes, depending on their needs. Families apply for the Elevate and Inspire scholarship, and Harris and her coaching staff evaluate each application to determine what to fund. The only costs the scholarship doesn’t cover are travel expenses and family spectator fees for competitions.
“If you want your kids to be here, I want your kids to be here,” Harris said. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll make it work.”
Diamond Xtreme Allstars had 10 scholarship athletes this past season. One child came to Fayetteville last year after fleeing Ukraine with her mother, Harris said. Another lost her father to cancer. The scholarship helped a mother afford cheer for her six daughters.
“The more kids that we can have that impact on and affect, we feel like we’re doing our part to prevent one more child out in the street doing something they’re not supposed to be doing or being a part of a crime or being a victim of a crime because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Harris said.
While total crime in Fayetteville is down so far this year compared to January through March of last year, data from the Fayetteville Police Department shows a 366% increase in homicides. Incidents like gunfire near the 2025 Dogwood Festival on April 26 and outside a carnival in Fayetteville last month, in which a 12-year-old girl was shot and injured, prompted Fayetteville Mayor Mitch Colvin to propose “sweeping new laws” to address gun violence in the city.
The laws, to be discussed at a special city council meeting on May 5, include a citywide 9 p.m. curfew for unattended minors and harsher penalties for parental non-compliance.
Fayetteville Police Department data shows a slight drop in juvenile crime incident reports this year compared to January through March 2024. However, the number of crimes involving weapons and assaults is up.
Fostering community
Harris teaches more than cheer and tumbling at Diamond Xtreme Allstars. She also teaches about community service.
Kids from the gym’s cheer programs visit veterans at the Department of Veterans Affairs. They collect clothes, shoes and blankets for people who are homeless. The kids purchase gifts from the Angel Tree program — a program started by Walmart and the Salvation Army that provides Christmas gifts to low-income children every year.
“That’s our way of giving back to the community,” Harris said. “We explain to the kids the purpose of why we do these things.”
The goal is to teach young people how to be fully functional residents of Fayetteville and good Samaritans of their community, Harris said.
Inside the gym, Harris and her coaching staff exemplify the same caring attitude. Coaches discourage any cliquey and exclusive behavior. Harris meets with each child at the start and end of every season to discuss their goals.
The coaching staff’s care is extended to families. Harris said Diamond Xtreme Allstars is a family-oriented gym that works with guardians to ensure cheer can remain a stable part of their young athlete’s life, no matter what is happening at home.
“I’ve seen families through financial issues. I’ve seen families through health and hardships and home displacements — all things that are very common in our society,” Harris said. “If anything is the first thing to go out of a family budget, it’s typically something to do with kids. I always felt like this is something I could do to give back and take that burden off somebody.”
CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the News Foundation of Greater Fayetteville.