ARLINGTON, Tex. — Even in the discomfort of back and neck braces, Katie Kent, 15, wore her cheerleader uniform on Wednesday morning for a pep rally to send her brother and his teammates off to the state championship game.

She and several other cheerleaders from Iraan High School had been seriously injured in a bus accident after a playoff victory on Dec. 2. The crash killed Iraan’s booster club president, left the chaperone for the varsity cheerleader squad hospitalized with multiple fractures and shocked a small, close-knit community located among the mesas and oil fields of West Texas.

All of the cheerleaders had been released from the hospital. All would attend Thursday’s title game. Kent was not about to miss seeing her brother, Clayton, playing quarterback for the Iraan Braves, even if her doctors and her parents might have preferred that she stayed home to mend the broken vertebrae in her back and neck.