There’s an important part of Queen’s Athletics that can be overlooked on the sidelines.
While it’s the athletes on the field or court who occupy most people’s attention, cheering on all the varsity teams are the members of the Queen’s Varsity Cheerleading Team. Present at every home football game and select basketball home games, the team performs elaborate performances and stunts in an attempt to energize the crowd.
In an interview with The Journal, co-head coach Dave Wesley-James talked about how undervalued the cheerleading team often is. “I think that a lot of people don’t really appreciate cheer for what it is,” Wesley-James said. “A lot of the time when people think about Cheer they think of people at football games waving pom-poms… but that is such a tiny, tiny part of what we do.”
Along with performing home games, the team also helps around campus and the broader Kingston area. The team has works with Relay for Life, the Winter Adapted Games, and helps with end-of-year events for elementary schools around the city as well.
However, the team’s main ambition is competing professionally around Canada, according to Wesley-James. “We are much, much more focused on competing, which I think probably most people when they see the Cheer team don’t even realize we have competitions,” he said.
The Cheerleading team undergoes a demanding workout schedule, training three times a week, with athletes expected to work out several times throughout the week on their own. During the practices, the team works on their routine to perfect their baskets, pyramids, tumbling, and stunts.
All this work is in preparation for Cheer Canada Nationals held in February, in which the team will look to defend its national championship which it won earlier this year.
According to Wesley-James, the team will look towards captains Kira Ng, ArtSci ’27, and Noah Budd, ArtSci ’27, to provide veteran leadership to help lead the team to another championship. The team also performs at the Power Cheerleading Athletics (PCA) Collegiate Championships, also held in February.
Historically, cheerleading has been a sport dominated by women but these gender stereotypes have been challenged at Queen’s.“For us, it’s quite a mix. We’ve got roughly a half and half split [of men and women],” Wesley-James said. “But if you look at the broader scope of cheerleading as a whole, it’s dominated by women. especially at the younger levels.”
As stated by Wesley-James, the fact that the sport is dominated by women has its advantages and disadvantages. On one side, the sport provides an opportunity women to participate in athletics and helps offset the heavily man-dominated sports, such as football. He said woman-dominated landscape has led to barriers in other ways, such as preventing the sport from becoming part of the Olympic Games.
“For Olympic sports, the IOC is looking for sports that have great participation from both genders. So, cheerleading being so female dominated, that’s actually viewed as a negative for getting into the Olympics,” he said.
Olympics aside, there’s no debating the prevalence of the cheer team in Queen’s Athletics and Kingston as a whole.
Tags
Cheerleading, national championships, Varsity Cheer
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