As we push towards the winter season of sports, cheer flips and turns into full competition mode. With spirts soaring and energy higher than ever, this year’s team is expected to showcase all the hard work that the Robinson cheerleaders have put in.

To kick off the season, the cheerleaders traveled to Brandon High School, starting strong with second place out of 9 teams. Continuing on with their Second comp, the team traveled back to Sickles High School, where they placed Second place.

However, achieving this success was anything but easy, with Head Coach Brianna Godfrey revealing that after last season, the team had to completely rebuild.

“We essentially had to start over this year. We lost 2 coaches and lost 5 seniors out of the 11 athletes from last year.” Godfrey said. “Now we have 10 athletes and 4 new coaches. And with the athletes, they’ve done a really great job at picking up where we left off from last year. Even though they’ve lost their strength, so I’m proud that they picked up and regain that skill.”

Aniyah Kelly (’26), base for the cheerleading team, emphasizes the time and dedication spent in order to practice and perfect their outstanding performances.

“Originally we only had three to four practices a week just for sideline cheer.” Kelly said. “But now we’re practicing almost every day and then we have competitions on Thursday.”

Maile Abell (’26), Flyer and captain for the cheerleading team, speaks on the major changes prior to competitions due to losing someone on the team.

“We had spent so much time working on the routine throughout the week and losing someone was definitely hard,” Abell said. “We had to make some adjustments to the routine just the day before we competed, but we were able to overcome this challenge and hit our routine and win second place at the competition

Through shared practices and time spent for competitions, the team has developed strong chemistry while also highlighting the importance of each cheerleader for the team. Through this, they were able to learn difficult skills early on in their routine, for example, the hand-to-hand, where the flyer goes into a handstand in the base’s hands at prep level, and then dips to an extension.

“It’s more fun, because you actually depend on it to carry a good routine,” Kelly said. “It’s not like you’re just cheering alongside other people, in competitions, everyone on the team plays such a big role in carrying that good routine. It’s important to use everyone in order to make everything hit correctly.”