RICHMOND STUDENTS SHINE AT LAZER CHEER AUTUMN ADVENTURE 

The Lazer Cheer Academy, based in Catterick Garrison, provides excellent opportunities for many of our students. We recently received the following report form Molly Shanley, Year 12 student at Richmond Sixth Form College and long-time athlete with Lazer Cheer: 

“I just thought I would contact you and let you know about the latest success of Lazer Cheer Ice Queens. Richmond students in the team are Jessie Hankin – one of three coaches, and the athletes Molly Shanley, Ellie Hughes (both Year 12), Rose Harris and Ava Craggs (both Year 9) and Amelia Harton (Year 7).  

Last weekend, we braved the snow and drove down to Warwick, Coventry to take part in our first competition of the season – Cheer City Autumn Adventure. This was earlier than normal as our first competition is normally in January / February.  

We had been working on the routine since September but only had the full thing for two weeks before the competition. Only having 2 months to learn and perfect the routine was challenging at times and put the team under quite a lot of pressure.  

When we arrived at the competition, there weren’t that many people in the arena which makes it hard to create atmosphere and energy as there aren’t many people cheering for you when competing. However, we were confident during our warm-up and created our own vibe making us really excited to compete.  

When we competed it was one of the best runs we had ever done, and we hit zero meaning we had no mistakes that made the judges deduct points! This was really good when you consider that we only had two months to prepare.  

We also won our division (U17 Level 2) with a score of 96.2/100 which was also really good for our first time competing this season (that’s the average score we achieved by the end of the season last year).  

We also got a special recognition award called ‘Judges Choice’ for outstanding level 2 cheerleading which means the judges really enjoyed our performance out of all the level 2 teams that were there.  

During the awards ceremony, we also found out we had won Grand Champions for level 2 which means we had the highest score out of all the level 2 teams that were there. We were especially pleased with this as there were some really big cheer programmes there which have beaten us multiple times in the past.  

A couple days later we found out that we had actually received the highest score of the whole competition (which was split into four sessions over two days) and we had won our second Allstar Worlds bid to Orlando Florida, this time for 2026. This means we now have a bid for 2025 and 2026!”