Winter sports season has officially begun, and the cheer teams season is looking promising.
According to Flora Berglang, a junior on the varsity team, their improvement has been pretty consistent throughout the past couple seasons.
“There’s always new people coming in, so it’s a constant ebb and flow,” Bergland said. “I think once we click throughout the season, it will help us become more united.”
With the previous football season, a sense of familiarity with one another has already been established.
The program will still be participating at games, but according to senior Nahela Yazzie, varsity cheer captain, and head coach Sharlivia Slaughter, games likely aren’t going to be the challenge this season.
Yazzie explained how football season is primarily the season for people to get trained for the more intense winter season.
“For football varsity, we learn somewhere between 35 to sometimes 50 [cheers],” Yazzie said. “But for basketball, we like to have a minimum of 80 to 90 cheers, up to 100, and that’s sometimes not even including the battle catalog.”
In addition to memorizing so many cheers, the cheer program is now participating in competitions against other teams in their new category, “Stomp-N-Shake.”
Slaughter further explained their fight for competitions.
“This is about to be my third competition ever as a head coach,” she said. “[Last year] we made history as the first team in the state of Oregon to ever compete under Stomp-N- Shake,” Slaughter said.
What’s especially motivating this year is that the team will not be competing against themselves; other schools will be partaking in “Stomp-N-Shake. This was not the case last year.
“It’s exciting because we actually get to compete against somebody else just like how people will compete in sports contests like football or basketball,” Slaughter said.
Unfortunately, other schools have taken on the assumption that our program is attempting to take credit for this style of cheer, but Slaughter makes the distinction that while other schools in the past have participated in “Stomp-N-Shake”, the team is the first program to ever push for it as a state category.
“When you get a lot of praise for something, you also get a lot of hate,” Slaughter stated.
However, this doesn’t stop Slaughter from pursuing the purpose of the program.
“I want all girls and boys to have equal opportunity to show this style of cheer,” Slaughter said.
As a long term goal, Slaughter wants to eventually make Stomp-N-Shake cheer an official category in the state of Oregon. In order for this to happen, they need other schools to express interest, at which point it can be added as a state level category.
“I’m not going to stop until we make that happen,” Slaughter said.
Despite these hopes and challenges for the program, Yazzie is excited for the season and to watch everyone grow.
“I’m pretty excited, I’m kind of sad it’s my last season,” Yazzie said. “[But as captain] really try to push them a little bit each time, so I hope that everyone gets even more confident with themselves.”
Along with some future team bonding in store, Bergland has confidence in her captains to lead the team into a season with even more strength, growth and passion.
