From their historic season record to their first-place finishes, Liberty’s cheer team has been breaking records since the start of their competition season.
“This whole journey has been amazing,” senior Carmen Maxey said. “We went from not even making state last year to absolutely conquering this one.”
Cheer co-captain Keanuenuemaikalan Ortega-Misaengsay concurs with Maxey.
“Everyone on the team is so talented and so hardworking. It’s been a hard season, but they rose to the challenge,” Ortega-Misaengsay said.
According to Maxey and Ortega-Misaengsay, the team’s success can be attributed largely to their new coach, Wes Weidle.
“He’s pushing us to be better cheerleaders and better people because he knows we’re capable of doing that,” Maxey said.
“He’s organized, he’s great at communicating, and he’s an all-around great coach,” Ortega-Misaengsay said.
Weidle, who began coaching the team just this year, began his cheerleading career long before he arrived at Liberty.
“I was a cheerleader in college, and I really fell in love with the sport through that experience,” Weidle said. “I decided to get into coaching once I had a stable career here, and then the position at Liberty opened up right around the same time that happened.”
Weidle didn’t spare any time switching things up for the team. He created new chants for football games, choreographed new routines, and encouraged the cheerleaders to try new stunts they’d never before considered.
“It was a pretty drastic change,” Weidle said. “We have new cheers, new choreography, new everything. For me, it was about taking a team with an already good foundation and taking it to the next level.”
With Weidle coaching the team, the Liberty cheerleaders have been winning nonstop. But that success didn’t come without sacrifice. The team began learning their competition routine in October of 2024, working on their performance while simultaneously practicing for and cheering at sports events – a feat that meant they had to cheer in some capacity at least six days a week, according to Maxey.
“You have to practice like you’re performing, and that takes a ton of energy,” Maxey said. “At the end of every practice, we’d do a couple of full-outs, too.”
Full-outs are run-throughs of the team’s entire routine, a three-minute combination of stunts, jumps, kicks, and other complicated moves. At the end of every practice, the cheerleaders were understandably exhausted.
But the team’s hard work paid off big-time. On January 25, they took home the WIAA State Championship title, a feat made possible by their event (and personal) high score of 88.6 points.
“It was like, ‘What just happened?’” Maxey said. “I almost couldn’t believe it.”
“It was awesome to know that all the hard work we’d put in, all the hard work our coach put in, that it had paid off.” Ortega-Misaengsay said.
Weidle, however, attributes the team’s success to the cheerleaders themselves.
“They are humble and hardworking kids,” Weidle said. “The chemistry that they have is amazing, and that’s something you don’t see very often, if at all, in high school sports. I’ve never had a group easier to coach.”
The cheerleaders’ dedication and effort have paid off, and Weidle hopes that in the future, their work can be recognized by others, too.
“There’s this stereotype that cheerleaders are just pom-poms and skirts, and that’s just not true. These girls have serious endurance and athleticism and coordination,” Weidle said.
Performing a perfectly synchronized, award-winning routine is no easy feat – especially when that routine involves throwing people in the air in perfect sync. Still, Liberty’s cheerleaders have managed to do it perfectly all season.
“I knew we could go far with the right amount of coaching, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted just how far we would go,” Ortega-Misaengsay said. “Still, I couldn’t have asked for a better team to win State with.”
