Description

Joss Kendrick is the eighteenth Girl of the Year. She was released in 2020. ## Personality Joss is a ten-year-old girl who surfs, skateboards, later participates in cheerleading, and was born with hearing loss. Joss is fully deaf in her left ear with no ability to hear from that side; she wears a hearing aid in her right ear to assist the low level of hearing she has. Joss can lip read, which she uses to supplement her hearing aid. She often communicates with American Sign Language (ASL); this is done when she cannot hear clearly, and her whole family can also sign to communicate with her. She has adapted to her hearing loss her whole life with various methods, such as placing her phone under her pillow so the vibrations wake her (since she cannot hear the alarm ringing). Early in the morning or late at night, her hearing aid is out; she refers to this as Quiet Time/"QT", where she can tune out the world and make everything almost quiet with sounds too blurry to process. She gets frustrated when people do not face her when speaking so she can understand what they're saying better, or when they speak to her loudly when they learn she has hearing loss. Joss is a surfer who has been surfing since she was six years old (she did not wear her hearing aid then, either). She considers herself a "speed demon" who aims to try to catch air (aerial tricks) most. She also skateboards, which helps with her surfing practice, and throughout the series takes up cheerleading. She is right-handed and "goofy-footed", surfing and skateboarding with the right foot leading on the board and pushing with the left as her dominant. Joss is the youngest of three and has two older brothers: Liam and Dylan. All three children are surfers, as well as their mom; their dad is a bad swimmer and doesn't surf at all. The Kendricks live in Fountain Valley, California, and Joss is in the fourth grade at the start of the series. Her favorite athlete is Tina Hart, a professional surfer. Joss is somewhat impulsive and sometimes does not think before she acts, especially when her older brother Dylan eggs her on and she feels she must prove something to him. This can lead to her causing injuries or being injured herself. To help her focus on the tricks she is trying, she pictures them in her head, a tip from Liam to visualize her tricks to prepare to actually do them. This gets crossed at times when she starts performing in cheerleading, both for good (creating the "Victory Air") and bad (thinking of surf tricks at cheer practice and falling off the trampoline). Joss initially struggles with cheerleading, especially after her stunt position changes from that of a base (one of three girls on the ground supporting the stunt) to a flyer (the girl held up in the air to do tricks) when a teammate is injured. Joss finds flying is much harder than she assumed, and struggles to balance in her stunts, especially the "elevator" stunt in her team's routine, due to a fear of falling and becoming injured too. She worries she will not be able to successfully perform the stunt at the upcoming cheer competition, and fears that this will cause her teammates to resent her; particularly because she knows that without her stunt, her team will not score high enough to beat their rival cheer team. Eventually, she can trust her bases and teammates again after a team sleepover, and she successfully does the elevator stunt at the cheer competition, though the team does not win despite it. Nonetheless, she is proud of the work her team put in and with renewed confidence in her abilities, she begins to enjoy cheer again.