“Who’s house? Our House! We are SFSU!” 

San Francisco State University’s cheer club is jumping to new heights again with creative choreography and a budding community.

Amaya Minor enrolled at SFSU in 2023, and after discovering the previous team had no intentions of planning for the upcoming season in 2024, she took the initiative to start the club cheer team. Working at the Mashouf Wellness Center, she met many club teams and connected with other girls who seemed interested in restarting cheer at SFSU.

Minor’s drive to start the club began with a longing to find a community as a freshman on a new campus. 

“I just realized that not having cheer was affecting my mental health,” Minor said. “So once I had the platform, and I had the information and the connections to start the cheer team. I was working in a space where I could actually do it, then I just did it.”

Along with her duties as president, Minor is the creative curator of the club, creating stunts, routines and overall choreography. The inspiration comes from skills that she had learned from prior cheer experiences and putting them together to see what fits in the routine.

“There are certain aspects a routine has to include, like technique, cleanliness and overall performance, and that’s all accounted for when selecting music,” Minor said.

Vice President Jolie Sesky explained how they use their performances to engage the university’s school spirit, while also bringing traction to different school events.

“There’s also another side of it where you’re trying to defend your school spirit title across your entire state, and it’s not just about entertaining the crowd,” Sesky said. “It’s about entertaining and athleticism and dedication and work.” 

Although Minor choreographs the routines, it is a collaborative process among the officers to determine which routines should be cleaned up before a competition or performance. 

“We do have a lot of practices throughout the week, but I think a lot of our material is practiced at home,” said team secretary Emma Sundland. “So it’s just really depending on your team to get that in place and get all the material down so that we can all come together on the day of practice.”

The dance routines are one aspect of the club, but building a community is the most important. To achieve this, the club holds several team bonding events throughout the season to build trust and friendship among its members.

“We love volunteering, which is like something that we’re mainly focused on, but that’s something that we all like to do together and that’s what we’re gonna be mainly focused on for our team bonding events coming up this season,” Sesky said.

For the rest of the squad, they learn the routines during practice by learning and following the counts that are given by Minor. 

First-year cheerleader Yasmine Walker explains how learning the routines can be fun, but it also allows them to know when to focus. 

“By staying focused and practiced, it gets more serious,” Walker said. “We definitely got to lock in more and all the excitement and nerves building up to it definitely helps push us to go and do our best with the routines already.” 

The cheer team practices three days a week in the San Francisco Federal Credit Union Gymnasium. Each week, practices vary depending on what the squad is preparing for, whether it be stunting, tumbling or perfecting a routine. 

“Sometimes we just do stunting, sometimes we just do dancing, but when we have specific events coming up, we mainly focus on those events,” said second-year cheerleader Kierra James. “That way, everyone can feel comfortable and it eliminates the room for nerves of not feeling like you know what you’re performing.”

The club has performed for the past two years on and around SFSU. The team held their tryouts in March and is preparing for the next season.

Their season starts at a summer camp, the United Spirit Association Cheer camp, where they start doing skill drills to learn more about different skills needed to be a successful team. Following that, the club cheer would go to a qualifying event in the winter, and then on to compete at nationals in the spring, depending on the outcome of the qualifiers. 

“It’s a performance, and it’s also an athletic demonstration of lifting, throwing, keeping your body super tight and squeezing your core and using all the muscles in your body, it’s a lot,” Sesky said. “So I would say that kind of keeps us motivated to prove to SF State that we’re not just a cheer team, we’re this collection of athletes, even though we’re this newer program.”