The top high school cheer teams from all over the state of Florida converged on a packed Stephen C. O’Connell Center at the University of Florida in Gainesville on Tuesday for the FHSAA Competitive Cheer State Championships, with three of those teams coming from right here in the Plant City area as Strawberry Crest, Plant City and Durant all earned their chance to compete.
Strawberry Crest and Plant City had previously been named co-Western Conference Champions in January, establishing themselves as the premier squads that Hillsborough County had to offer, and both teams were once again able to lift a trophy this week as they each took home state championship victories in their respective divisions.
Following their performance in the FHSAA 2A Small Non-Tumbling division, Plant City’s supporters waited on bated breath during the award presentations, ears perked up and listening intently through isolated and muffled cheers as teams were called out one-by-one, awarded 10th place, then ninth, then eighth, and so on. When Sickles High School was announced as the second place finishers, celebrations could begin for Plant City as their cheer team watched their dream of being crowned state champions unfold when their name was called next.
Led by head coach Sara Kate Snapp, Plant City’s state championship victory was the cheer team’s first in school history.
For Strawberry Crest, participating earlier in the day in the Small CoEd division, the announcement that they had earned this year’s state championship certainly brought no less excitement, but also continued to reinforce a standard of perfection that the team has steadily built for the better part of a decade now.
The latest victory on Florida’s biggest stage was their eighth consecutive state championship dating back to 2015, with the run also including a Universal Cheerleaders Association high school national championship in 2020 and two bronze medals along the way.
“It never gets old,” coach Loveny Savarino said. “It doesn’t matter the division, it doesn’t matter the routine, it never gets old. And cheerleading is such a great sport that it evolves every year with new rules and things like that, so our teams just get better and better. We compare ourselves to what we were last year, what we were two years ago, so we’re our own bar as a program.”
Despite Strawberry Crest’s lengthy run of success, no year comes without its own unique struggles. Last year COVID played a significant role on their season, as it did to many teams, forcing them to change divisions mid-season. This year, it was fighting through the pressure to reach that gold standard once again with a young team.
But the culture that Strawberry Crest has built works as its own driving force, a visible and tangible goal that shows what can be accomplished at the end of a year’s worth of hard work.
“You definitely need a culture to win and we try to instill that in our kids right away and let them know that even though there are prior wins or that you may have won before, you have to work hard and even harder to keep going. Nothing is given, it is all earned,” Savarino said. “They learn real quick that they have to put their own mark on the legacy, so we try not to think of it as eight in a row, we think of it as them leaving their own mark. Every team is a new team and you get a chance to leave your mark and end up on the wall. In our gymnasium we have big pictures of those who have won states and it’s nice because when we practice in the gym, they get to look up and see that legacy, the seven teams that have won states. We point up there and tell them that if they want to be a part of that wall, they have to work hard.”