From tumbling across a beam to dancing, flipping, and chanting, junior Jordan Boltres is entering new territory. She is retiring the vaults and beams and trading them in for pom poms and chants as she joins the new FHC competitive cheer team this season.

“Honestly, it wasn’t my choice to do competitive cheer in the first place,” Jordan said. “Some of the girls had told the coach about me and my gymnastics background. She came up to me one day and invited me to a practice.”

After suffering injuries to both of her arms, the past few years have been a relentless search for a new and promising sport. While Jordan tried other sports, like track and diving, joining the cheer team was something that she decided to stick with.

“I wasn’t super thrilled to go to the first practice, but because everyone was expecting me to be there, I went,” Jordan said. “I fell in love with it right away.”

According to senior and cheer veteran, Sarah Hubble, FHC had an abundance of students try out for the team, which resulted in splitting off from the other schools.

“In previous years, our team has been a mix of FHC, FHE, and FHN,” Sarah said. “We had a really big turnout at tryouts this year and now we have, I believe, twenty-three girls on our team.”

Now that the team is set in stone, they have practice every day for two hours. At each practice, they learn new dances, cheers, and also work on perfecting the old ones.

“So far I love it, and all the girls are amazing,” Jordan said. “It was super intimidating at first, being the only one on the team who has never cheered before. Everyone is usually really patient with me and flexible when I’m learning new stuff.”

According to junior Grace Conn, practices are a lot more intense than sideline cheer. They spend most of their time perfecting rounds and making everything look the best it can.

Agreeing with Grace, Sarah said that she believes the competitive cheer practices are very organized and energetic.

“Our new coach’s name is Olivia Betts, and there is an assistant coach named Hannah,” Grace said. “Both of them are new to the school, and they bring a lot of excitement and energy [to the team].”

According to Jordan, she thinks it is pretty cool to have a new coach and a new competition season.

“We have a lot of plans for the season,” Jordan said. “Just to be able to show everyone what we have been working on and how we are able to rework our whole team is pretty great.”

Sarah is hoping the student body will support the team.

“We have a lot of talent this year,” Sarah said. “Come out, support us, and know that we are trying our best to win.”