With the month of November just around the corner, the creation of a new cheerleading team here on campus will soon follow.  Although there is already an all girls team and a co-ed team, the new cheerleading team brings a new aspect to the sport that has not been present here before.

Thanks to sophomores Marissa Bekken and Alex Riska, current cheerleaders at UW-Whitewater, the creation of a competition cheerleading team will soon be a reality.

“I just came up with the idea and everyone thought it was pretty good, so I wanted to get the word out,” Bekken said.

Riska said that ideas have been floating around, but combining both teams would be something new.

“The idea of having the all girl and co-ed teams compete has been brought up before, but never combining the two teams for purely competition,” Riska said.

This new team will be performing and competing only.  Since you have to be on either the all girls team or the co-ed team as a pre-requisite, nobody is on the new competition team yet.

Bekken said the plan is to release all tryout information about the competition team at the co-ed and all girl tryouts in the Williams Center gymnastics gym Nov. 1 and 3 from 8-11 p.m. and Nov. 6 from 6-9 p.m., respectively.

The tryouts for the competition team will be shortly after the all girl and co-ed teams tryout.

“The reason we are making this team is because what so many cheerleaders miss from high school is the competition aspect of cheerleading,” Bekken said.

The current co-ed team cheers for the football team and the men’s basketball team while the all girls team cheers for the women’s basketball team.

Unfortunately before this year when the football team or the basketball teams seasons were over, the cheerleaders didn’t have anything else to look forward to.

Bekken said with the addition of this new competition cheerleading team at UW-Whitewater, our cheerleaders can now compete with other schools in the conference such as UW-Oshkosh and UW-Eau Claire.

“This is going to be a family cheer squad made up of the best of the all girl team and the best of the co-ed team,” Bekken said.