Senior Spotlight
Cheerleading an outlet for Zane
Jadynne Zane may not consider herself a top-notch athlete, but she has the tenacity of one.
The Maui High School senior worked through a painful injury to perform in the Maui Interscholastic League cheerleading championships as a junior.
Zane missed her senior season of cheering for the Sabers due to the pandemic, but she is hopeful to get some time on the tennis court this spring in her final athletic go-round in high school.
She started cheerleading as a freshman and it helped balance a demanding academic load.
“I’d say typically when it comes to balancing school and cheer, or how to meet hand in hand, I always struggle in the beginning,” Zane said. “First quarter, I struggle balancing both. But with cheer, I’d never let go of it.
“My mom would be, like, ‘You’re going to get really busy, you’ve got to drop it, but I’m, like, ‘I will never drop cheer.’ Cheer helps me relieve myself and kind of reset mentally.”
Shelby Ah Wah has been coaching Maui High cheerleading for 15
Senior Spotlight is a special series highlighting standout
MIL student-athletes as they reflect upon their high school careers and look toward the future. Stories will run periodically in The Maui News.
years, but rarely if ever sees a team member like Zane.
“She is a very driven girl, in anything she does she’s very driven,” Ah Wah said of Zane. “She’s focused, she knows what she wants, and once she knows what she wants she’s going to put the work in to get it done. She’s just a team player, very humble — she is not out for doing anything other than what her job is and working hard at it.”
Ah Wah shakes her head at just how driven Zane is when cheering, recalling last season’s MIL cheering championships.
“After competition last year we found out that her bone in her wrist was separated,” Ah Wah said. “But we didn’t know until after. She didn’t want to miss out on the competition and she wasn’t complaining. She just did the job.”
It is the classroom where Zane truly excels. She currently has a 5.0 grade-point average as a senior — on a 4.0 scale — on the strength of five Advanced Placement classes;
she also took two AP classes as a sophomore, and four more as a junior. Her cumulative GPA is 4.2 and she will deliver the Maui High graduation speech as the No. 1 valedictorian in her class.
She has applied to 32 colleges — that list includes every Ivy League school but one.
“As for college, I’m still currently awaiting my college decisions, but I’m for sure certain on the fact that I want to go to a four-year university on the Mainland, majoring in biomedical engineering,” Zane said. “I have two interests — I’m interested in both medicine and engineering, so basically the major is those two combined, so, yeah, it’s perfect.”
Before she starts making medical devices like prosthetics or pacemakers, she may join the dance team or possibly cheer at the school she ends up at.
“She knows what she wants to be and she’s focused on getting there,” Ah Wah said.
Mom Jeremy Zane started challenging Jadynne from a young age. Dad Darryl Zane also pitches in. Jadynne said her mom is her “therapist” — “I can always talk to her about my schoolwork and she’ll keep me in check,” Jadynne said — and her dad is her “mentor relief.”
“I wasn’t always the smartest kid, I think my mother really influenced me in being ahead of the class — it’s not something I choose to do on my own,” Zane said. “I was enrolled in this thing called Kumon, it’s like every kid’s nightmare, and it’s funny because now I work there.
“My mom enrolled me in the program and she made sure that I was really strong in math because it was something that she struggled with.”
Zane has worked with a former teacher that she calls a
“mentor,” Jennifer Suzuki, since the pair met at Maui Waena Intermediate School when Zane was a shy sixth grader.
Zane’s latest program that she used for her senior project was a medical learning class for middle schoolers where she made and hand-delivered goody bags with the hands-on lesson materials inside.
It was a four-session, oncea-week program that was forced to go online in October 2020 due to COVID-19 concerns. Still, it was featured in a Hiki No video on the PBS Hawaii television station.
“My goal, I guess, was to make a program for kids here, a permanent program,” Zane said. “Throughout high school I created other programs with my mentor, Ms. Suzuki. My freshman summer, I created this robotics camp for middleschool students — we taught them how to program in robots and we also had a mini-robotics competition. In my sophomore year, I created another program where I introduced students to the world of science through hands-on experience.
“My junior summer, before my senior year, we planned for a medical exploration lab, but unfortunately we had to push it back due to the COVID. So, this past fall I created a program to introduce students to the world of medicine. It’s very interesting.”
She started and is the president of the Maui High Girls Can STEM Club and is also the president of the MHS National Honor Society. She’s the vice president of Interact club, and is also communications director for the school’s PacificAsian Affairs Council.
It is cheering on the Sabers, however, that keeps her smiling.
“It’s so easy for me with my course load to get overwhelmed, stressed, but cheer always keeps me in check,” Jadynne said. “It helps me stay planted, stay grounded. I think cheer is the perfect place where you can witness teamwork.”