Have you ever wondered what our Cheerleading team here at Hollis Brookline High School is up to when you don’t see them at football or basketball games? On January 6, CavChron member Rachel Lindof sat down with Audrey Schultz ‘22 to talk about the team this season. Schultz is a captain on the Cheer team and has been a part of Hollis Brookline Varsity Cheer for her entire high school career. 

CavChron: How many years have you been cheering, and for how many have you been a captain?

Schultz: I’ve been cheering since the sixth grade, so a pretty long time, and I’ve been captain for three seasons. I’ve been captain my senior year for both seasons and I was captain for the fall season in junior year.

What is your favorite part about being a cheerleader?

I love the atmosphere so much because I feel like our team is just very close with each other and we love the sport but we also genuinely care about each other, so even outside of practice or games we’re always looking out for each other and I really love that dynamic. 

The sport of Cheerleading is fortunate to have two seasons, in both the fall and winter, while most sports only have one season per year. What do you think the main differences are between the two seasons for the Cheer team here at HBHS?

Fall season is really more focused on going to the football games and doing stuff for our football team which is a lot of fun; we love to set up and do all of that. There’s usually a lot more people in the fall season and that’s when we teach new people the basics and how to do things. In winter it’s usually a smaller team of people who want to continue improving their skills so with that we take our skills from the fall season and we build upon that and I feel like we’re a lot more focused on our competition season in winter. 

Is there anything you are doing differently this season compared to in the fall? 

Not really, I’d say that the winter season is always a little more intense than the fall season because there’s more conditioning and more focusing on having the right technique. 

How has the winter season been going so far this year?

The winter season has been really fun so far; we haven’t cheered at any of the basketball games yet which kind of stinks because it’s fun to do that, but we’ve had a lot of time to work on stunts and we are doing so good with our routine and we’re so strong this year.

What are your goals for the team this season?

This season I’m hoping just to feel really confident at our first competition and feel really confident throughout every competition. I’m hoping that there won’t be any injuries and that we are really solid when we hit our stunts.

How is the team working to reach those goals?

We’ve been working on stunts every single day, I think our coaches are going to get Sean from Bee Beau Choreography, our professional choreographer back and he’s going to work with us for like a stunting clinic so we can learn new and more advanced stunts which will give us more points and were focusing a lot more on our tumbling which is exciting.

How can we support the team this season? Will you be at basketball games? Which ones? Which competitions?

There’s a basketball game on the thirteenth, I know we will be at that one, we won’t be at all of the basketball games though, I think we’re only going to be cheering at three. We have a bunch of competitions in February; there’s five competitions this year. It’s really nice when people come to the games and come to our competitions, it’s really nice just to have people be there.

I know there is going to be another Hannah Bazemore Memorial Competition this season which is something very important to the team and community. What do you want people to know about that before it happens?

The Hannah Bazemore Memorial Competition is definitely a very emotional day and I feel like a lot of the students don’t come to it because I feel like they hear “cheer competition” and it just doesn’t really strike any interest. Of course it’s a cheer competition, so teams can get their scores and improve, but I think it can be a really big community thing because usually Mr. Bazemore speaks, sometimes Oakley speaks, and it’s really just heartfelt and it’s nice to hear what they have to say. We raise a ton of money for the Hannah Bazemore Foundation which is for suicide prevention and bullying awareness and I feel like a lot of people don’t really know that. It’s a really nice thing to be a part of and I wish more of our community was a part of it.

Is there anything you wish more people knew about the Cheer team here at HB?

I feel like a lot of people don’t actually see what we do, like they see us at games and we do the cheers and all that but there’s so much more to our team. We love to support our teams and it’s a lot of fun to do that but we have so much more than everybody else sees, like we do super advanced tumbling and stunts that we can’t do on a hardwood floor or on a track and there’s a lot of work and effort that we put into it because it’s not just waving around pom poms and I feel like a lot of people think that, but we put so much effort into what we do.

If you want to show some support for the cheer team this season, you can see them compete at Cheer Madness on 2/12, AstroBlast on 2/26, Preliminary Rounds on 3/6, and States on 3/10. The Hannah Bazemore Memorial Competition will be on 2/20 here at HBHS. You can also see them cheer at the home basketball games on 1/13, 1/26, or 2/3.