With the start of the Jaguar Cheer competition, this team has already proved they are a force to be reckoned with, making significant jumps in the history of the JHS team. This past November, the JHS cheerleaders went to Galveston to compete in one of their regional competitions for this season and placed third, earning their bid to Nationals this year in Orlando, Florida. 

“We’re a young team that’s still growing and so I think that to come in and still be able to compete with some really great teams is really phenomenal,” Tiffany Stratton, the JHS cheer coach, said.

Stratton has been in charge of the cheer team for two years now and has led this team to success in recent years. She first started out, unknown to others, as a kindergarten teacher until she was offered a position in the Jaguar family. Stratton was a cheerleader for seven years in her youth and she knows what it takes to make a great team and was perfect for the position. 

“It’s definitely been a learning experience and I tell the girls all the time that I don’t know everything, I’m figuring it out with y’all but I feel very fortunate because I feel like I have some really amazing athletes that are very understanding but also are wanting to build this program with me,” Stratton said. 

The next competition for the young JHS team is Dec. 17 in San Antonio. Recent weeks have been spent in preparation for this competition and the team has put in several hours of practice for weeks. The cheer team competes game day cheer in their competitions which consists of four parts: a band chant, a situational cheer, a sideline cheer, and then the schools’ fight song. 

“We got off the mat and we felt really good about our performance. We had some little hiccups but everything else went really well I think,” senior cheerleader Haley Escobar said about this past competition. 

The cheer team is hoping to pull out a win at Nationals and to continue to push the envelope of what is possible. 

“You can’t have a bad inning, you can’t have a bad minute, you have to be on for that full minute and if you mess up you better mess up very quickly and get back on it,” Stratton said. 

The cheerleaders work so hard to be able to do what they do and are prepared for greatness in all aspects. 

“This year I want to make it to finals so we can show her that we’ve improved last year,” Escobar said.