Patriots cheerleading team wins back-to-back OFSAA championships
Back-to-back champions.
It’s got a nice ring to it if you’re the Saint Paul Patriots cheerleading team, which made it two titles in a row at the South Region Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations finals at Notre Dame College School in Welland earlier this month.
Winning has become common for the Niagara Falls team, which also placed first a few years back at a world competition at the Disney Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando.
Earlier this month, the 16-member squad brushed aside seven other teams and recorded the highest score of all competitors across the province.
“I think that a lot of it is just repetition of practice,” said Brooklyn Enns, a Grade 10 student and one of the team’s captains.
“We made sure that when we do everything, everything looks sharp and clean.”
She said a lot of the girls were new to the team this year, out of Grade 9, which is why the routine repetition came in handy.
“We used a lot of the same routines that we did last year, but then we tweaked them a bit and added some stuff to it, so we already knew that the routines are successful,” said Enns.
“It was just about making sure that everything was sharp with the same routine that we knew had potential to win because we used it last year.”
Brianna Gordon, a Grade 12 student and another team captain, said she and her teammates are all “very competitive and we all wanted to win.
“We wanted to do the same thing we did last year.”
Sheila DeLuca, a teacher/coach of the team, said the cheerleading program has been at Saint Paul Catholic High School for more than 30 years.
“We have a pretty strong culture and commitment, who make this program continue and to last,” she said. “It’s a commitment from September until April.”
DeLuca said the cheerleading team participates in school football games and in the community, making it a during-school, after-school and on-weekends commitment.
“They were instrumental in the Colour Wars Pep Rally,” DeLuca said. “They participated in Santa Claus parade, and then other interscholastic competitions, so they’re really a part of the community.”