From the Ground Up: How Eastside Cheer built its renowned program

From relative unknowns to four-time Washington State Champions to World Champions, Eastside Catholic Cheer has certainly made its mark.

Given the rapid rise of the program, how has Eastside Catholic cheer managed the turnaround and solidifying of its legacy over the past decade, on and off the mat?

While Eastside Catholic’s football team tends to soak up a lot of the local headlines, the group of girls on the sidelines might actually be even more accomplished than boys they’re cheering for. During the cheerleaders’ “sideline season,” their role is mainly just to get the crowd pumped up for the game. And nobody does this better than the Eastside Catholic Cheer team.

Eastside Catholic Cheer has been around for as long as the school has, cheering on what was once a middling football team while working to establish their cheer program as one to be reckoned with. While Eastside Catholic has a big name and an even bigger history behind it, the cheer team has had to make its mark on its own.

During the early years of the school, the cheer team made it to some of the first National High School Cheer Competitions and started what would be a very successful legacy with the cheer team revisiting nationals for decades to follow.

Courtney Diaz started her journey with Eastside Catholic in 2015 after assistant coaching at Bellevue, and she started building what people know as Eastside Cheer today. As a UCA staffer at the time, Courtney saw a lot of culture and tradition in the school community and used that to build on the sideline aspect.

“There was a lot of good and a lot of established school culture that was a lot of fun to build on and play off of. There was a lot of eagerness to be more athletic and have more of that type of presence.”

But with every team, there is a growing year, one when you rebuild and start what will be a strong couple of years after. For Eastside, that year was 2015, Courtney’s first year with the team as she solidified the team’s building blocks for the next four years.

“There was a lot of want from the sophomores at the time, who had the experience of competing at a high school level and not winning.”

For the next four years, this group of athletes kept the drive strong and pushed themselves and each other to build a program to be proud of. They built this program from the group up and put Eastside Cheers name on the map.

These athletes set the tone for the next decade when the team said, “We are building a legacy,” giving every athlete on that team the drive and determination to make something of a team that had everything to prove and nothing to lose.

Starting in 2016, the Cheer team won their first state title and went on a winning streak after that. Coach Courtney Diaz was a huge part of this winning streak.

For 4 straight years, Eastside Catholic Cheer was killing the competition and sweeping the nation by coming out of nowhere.

Now, when Eastside Catholic cheer walks into a competition, they do not go unknown. Everyone in the cheer community expects a certain level of excellence and an idea of what the cheer program is.

But killing it on the track and the mat isn’t all that these athletes do.

Many of these athletes grew up in the Eastside Catholic Junior Cheer Program, which helps coach young football and cheerleaders before they go to high school. Eastsides team last year consisted of half the team coming from the junior program, 5 of the 8 seniors all participated in the program and graduated to high school level.

During their high school career, they continued to be involved, whether it was with junior buddies or coaching the teams. The high schoolers made it their mission to be as involved with the younger generation as they could.

Eastside Catholic Cheer Freshman Jo Luger has been a part of both the junior and high school programs for 11 years. Given her involvement at the junior level, Luger gained something of an upper hand by having such a familiarity with the program.

“[The EC Cheer program] setsyou up with friendships, and for me, I would not have made varsity if it wasn’t for my skill that I got in the junior teams.”

Being raised in Eastside Cheer, she watched the high school program change for years and watched them work as coaches and friends.

“For me, I thought of the high school team as like a mentor and people I could look up to.”

The idea of being an Eastside Catholic cheerleader has always held weight for the younger athletes, as they see their high school mentors walk around together in matching Crusaders Cheer outfits as a badge of honor and pride.

As Eastside Catholic Cheer enters it’s third season with new coaches, they reach for the possibility of returning to the four-time state champions that they were from 2016–2019.

Now a rising sophomore, Luger is eager to learn from new coaching and understand what’s being asked of an already-outstanding group of cheerleaders.

“[The coaches] are pushing us more this year then they did last year. This year, we are starting off really strong, and it can only go up from there.”

Building a legacy requires constant change and rebuilding. After a stellar five years, Eastside Catholic now faces its rebuilding period, faced with training a new age of athletics that strive to win.

Are we going to see a return to what Eastside Cheer was five years ago, or will they continue this period of rebuilding for years to come? Only time will tell as they head into another season of football and competition.