West Salem cheerleaders won the 2024 OSAA 5A/6A state championship on February 10th, giving our school a second team state title.
This competition was a lot of work for the Titan cheerleaders; but in the end, it was worth it. Carina Torres, one of the cheer coaches, said, “Preparing for the state competition included lots of challenging and intentional practices, as well as attending as many of the local competitions leading up to state. The mindset was to ‘practice like you perform’ and to ‘show up and make each practice count.’”
When asked what this means for the cheer team, Lexy Boynes said, “It definitely finally gives our cheer team some recognition that we are a sport and we are capable of accomplishing great things; Maybe this will even give us funding for our program because we currently don’t get any, I think it will bring great things to us for sure.”
These cheerleaders also had some tough competition but didn’t let that stop them from putting in the necessary work. Torres said, “Our division was the largest including 18 schools with some teams having up to 30 athletes with our two programs only being in our second year competing and having a small team of 12 honestly it was intimidating but we did not allow the competition to keep us from doing our best and that’s just what this team delivered .”
When asked what her reaction to this win was, Amelia West said, “We were hoping to win and we had won quite a few competitions before state but we had some fierce competition on our backs.” she continues to say, “We were all in shock and I immediately started crying.”
Our Titan cheerleaders winning the second team state trophy is huge for their team and so deserved. After being asked how she feels about this Boynes says, “It feels amazing! I think that we can finally get recognized for our hard work and capability as a team I think our team coaches Karina Torres Madison Kern and Alexa Molina Lopez as well as Jalen Lopez who I co-captain with this competition season worked really hard to get us the State title and I think we deserve it for sure!”
This competition was a lot of work for the Titan cheerleaders to get ready for but in the end paid off. With this win hopefully, comes the recognition they all deserve.
