On February 21, Jonathan Alder’s very own competition cheerleading squad won the Ohio Association Of Secondary School Administrators (OASSA) Division III Non-Building State Championship. This is the second year in a row that they have achieved this feat, and their fourth state title overall.
The team also won the Central Buckeye Conference (CBC) for the second time in school history alongside Northwestern. The last time the team won the CBC was during the 2020-2021 school year, where they won the conference championship alongside London.
The motto for this year’s team was “all in.”
Sophomore Sydney Bauerle attributes the origin of the motto to both the team’s choreographer, Shane Sanders, and to coach Kaylie Kindler. She believes that this motto helped motivate the team throughout the season, and pushed them to their limits, which helped them win both a conference and state championship.
“Our choreographer was creating our cheer and he wanted to have something flashy… so he came up with ‘all in for Alder,’” says Bauerle. ”Then coach [Kindler] really enjoyed it and she just ended up putting it all over our posters and we wrote papers on what ‘all in’ meant to us and then we had that to motivate us for the season.”
Competition cheer is fundamentally different from football and basketball cheer, which is also known as sideline cheer. Competition is more tumbling focused, while sideline cheer focuses heavily on chants and crowd engagement. Both types of cheer share those qualities though.
During competition, multiple factors go into scoring. For non-building cheer, the type that Alder specializes in, the categories include both standing and running tumbling, jumps, dance, timing and presentation. Non-building is characterized by its focus on dancing and tumbling.
Senior Cara Smith, who has recently committed to Bowling Green State University for cheerleading, also believes that coaches Haley Cochran and Kindler contributed heavily to this season.
“They were always pushing us,” says Smith. “They were always there, they always showed up, even through the ups and downs. And they were just like a rock for us.”
The competition squad included five seniors: Abbigail Lewis, Ava Rapp, Alaina Reynolds, Hannah Shop and Smith. Seniors Audrey Wilson and Ellen Wright also participated solely in the football cheer squads.
The state winning squad also consisted of freshmen Lily Kramer, Sophia Metz and Brooke Yost as well as juniors Myla Dickey and Reese Fry. Bauerle was unfortunately injured before states, but participated in the routine for every event leading up to the championship.
Many individuals also received conference honors. Dickey and Shop received CBC first team, junior Annie Kenyon and Rapp received second team, Smith received special mention and Fry received the sportsmanship award. The conference honors took both sideline and competition cheer into account.
This season was historic for Alder cheerleading. According to Smith, the competition program hasn’t always been as successful as it is now.
“Sideline has always been [successful],” she says. “But competition, it’s a different story. Our new coaches came into the story, and then we won states for the first time in 16 years… so I wouldn’t say we’ve always been successful with that route. But then we won back-to-back state champs.”
