To most Berkeley High School students, the cheer team is an essential part of the football and basketball game experience. However, outside of their appearances at games, the team is competitive in their own right. On Saturday and Sunday Jan. 25 and 26, 2025, the BHS varsity cheer team traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada and competed at the JAMZ national high school tournament. With teams from around the country present, they earned a whopping 93 out of 100 total score and took third place overall. This is a massive accomplishment that highlights the growth of the program and the countless hours of work it took to get to this level.
Tiffany Sutherland, cheer’s head coach, started working at BHS in 2017. Sutherland’s favorite part of being a cheer coach is watching the growth of each individual she works with. When talking about the expansion of the program, Sutherland quotes former head cheerleading coach Thelette Bennett, saying, “She was a coach here many, many moons ago. She loves the way that the program has flourished. She loves the fact that we are so diverse in the amount of different types of nationalities that we have on our team, the fact that we do have girls and boys.” Sutherland echoed Bennett’s compliments and added that this is one of the first years that cheer has varsity, junior varsity, and freshman level teams.
Sutherland attributes a hundred percent of the team’s recent success to the cheerleaders and their hard work. Sutherland believes that strong work ethic doesn’t get valued enough. She shared the cheer squad’s impressive and lengthy practice schedule. “During the summer we do two hours a day, four days a week. We run a mile every day. We do a lot of cardio work, mainly to work on our core, make sure our leg strength and arm strength are there. We try to build the muscles in our shoulders, so we do a lot of lifting in the weight room,” said Sutherland. Cheer is one of the only BHS sports that practices and competes all year. Despite common beliefs that cheerleaders only wave pompoms around, cheer is a sport that requires lots of commitment and physical prowess.
Both Sutherland and her cheerleaders believe that the greater BHS community doesn’t value or respect the cheer program enough, and some don’t see cheer is a real sport. They resent this viewpoint because of their extensive year-round training.
Ultimately, cheer absolutely killed it at the JAMZ tournament and brought home a massive win. Coach Sutherland gave thanks to the people who made cheer’s recent success possible, and she hopes the program’s growth will continue.