After performing in the fall, the cheer team welcomed new Unified students to the team for the basketball season. This is the first time the cheer team has included Unified students on their roster.

Shannon Maloney, Athletics Administration Assistant, is the head coach of the cheer team.

“This year we’re super excited to be able to open up our basketball season to Unified students,” Maloney said. “This has been the first year that we’ve had two athletes that have joined the team, and they’re doing fantastic. It’s just been incredible to be able to work with them and see them grow and find success.”

The idea of opening the cheer team to unified students has been in talks since coming back from COVID-19, but it took the right opportunity to make it happen.

“We had a foreign exchange student that joined us this year, and so we were looking at uniform opportunities for that person, and so that opened the door to be able to add some new students during basketball and see if we can make it work,” Maloney said. “We reached out to all the unified students just to see if there was any interest, and a couple of students said that they wanted to be a part of it.”

From there, the coaches brainstormed how to get the students prepared to perform.

“As a team, we kind of learn our material in different ways,” Maloney said. “We do in-person learning, we do video learning, and these opportunities just get everybody up to speed quickly.”

The cheer program consists of three teams: sideline, game day, and the traditional team. Unified students participate in the sideline team, which cheers on the sidelines during games, and prepare to perform their routine by practicing on Mondays during the basketball season.

“[Sideline is an] opportunity that is really there for students that are busy and have a lot going on in their schedule that want to be a part of our school community, but don’t necessarily have the time to be able to put in multiple days during the week,” Maloney said.

During these Monday practices, the sideline team starts the practice with the rest of the team, taking out the mats in the Auxiliary gym and warming up before breaking off to focus on their team-specific goals, which change depending on the season.

“If they’re competing at that time, they’ll work on their game day routine, and then traditional,” Maloney said.

The sideline team, with its new members, cheered at basketball games this season, in addition to practicing for and performing the halftime basketball performance. Additionally, the cheer team and Unified members performed at the Winter assembly on Dec. 20.

“We are just so fortunate to be able to have this opportunity,” Maloney said. “I think that West Linn’s model for inclusivity is really launching this program and allowing us to reach out to students that maybe wouldn’t necessarily have the opportunity to share [at] games. I just think we are so fortunate to be able to see that in the school district, and then we’ll be able to provide that at games too.”

This story was originally published on wlhsNOW on May 1, 2025.