Competitive cheer coming to the Hat

By Mo Cranker on December 19, 2017.

mcranker@medicinehatnews.com @MHNmocranker

For the first time in a long time, if not ever, Medicine Hat will be hosting a cheerleading competition.

Named Swarm the Hat, the competition will bring five or six outside clubs, as well as one local club and its teams together to compete in January.

“On Jan. 13 we’re hosting a competition here at the Cypress Centre,” said organizer and coach Debbie Schultz. “This is the first time ever we’ve had a cheerleading competition like this. If there ever was one, it would have been at least 30 or 40 years ago. So this is going to be the first time for a lot of people to see an all-star cheerleading competition in the city.”

Schultz says her local club, the Stingerz All-Stars, have wanted to host an event like this for quite a while, but were not able to make it all work until recently.

“We’ve known for a long time that we’ve wanted to do something like this for a while, but we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to at the start of this year,” she said. “We didn’t have a lot of teams committing to coming, but we put in the work and found some teams that were looking for somewhere to go and we’ve been able to make it happen.”

With cheerleading being bigger inlarger centres like Calgary and Edmonton, Schultz says the group is hoping this tournament will provide a place for southern cheerleaders to compete.

“I’ve coached for five years, but my son has never seen his sister perform,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of cases like that, where the competitions are always so far that people usually just stay home and only one parent can go to an event — our hope is to keep doing this every year and to hold it every year at the Canalta Centre once we get a few more teams interested.”

Schultz says the event will have tickets available to the public and she hopes it can bring more people to the city every year.

“We called it Swarm the Hat because we didn’t want it to be just about our local cheerleading team, but about the city as a whole,” she said. “We want to bring a lot of people to the city that may not have normally come in and showcase what we have.”

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