Local grad’s cheer team wins nationals
Jessica Bartlett, far left, holds the trophy she got when her team won the national cheer championship at the beginning of March. She is joined by her mother Alicia Bartlett, center, and grandmother Sally Giordano.
Jessica Bartlett heads to world championships in April
Jessica Bartlett, a 2014 Paso Robles High School graduate, has accomplished two of her top dreams in life. One is to win the national cheer championship and the second to win the world cheer championship. The first was accomplished at the beginning of March in Dallas, when her team, California All-Stars Snipers, made up of youths 12 to 18, won the national championships. She will travel to Orlando at the end of April, for those 18 and older, for the world championship.
“It was really such an amazing experience,” Bartlett said of her team winning nationals. “It’s definitely been a dream of mine.”
Bartlett moved to Ventura to train and compete with the Cali All-Stars SMOED (term for small, co-ed) cheer team, after spending her senior year of high school traveling to Ventura three times a week. “I moved to Ventura to be on one of the best cheer teams in the world,” she said. She was accepted to the University of California Berkeley, but decided to defer entrance for a year. In the fall, Bartlett will start attending Berkeley, where she will major in business.
While she would like to continue to cheer competitively, she’s unsure if she’ll have the time to dedicate to the training. Currently, she said she works out every day, but anticipates that it’ll drop to three times a week. The Cali All-Stars has teams around the state, Bartlett said, and she may be able to join the team in Livermore, which about an hour from Berkeley.
“I’ll be very sad if I have to stop,” Bartlett said.
Bartlett starting cheer when she was 10 years old at California Gold in Paso Robles. “[It] gave me the foundation I needed,” she said. While she said she did take some gymnastics classes when she was younger, it wasn’t until she started training at California Gold that she really got serious about it. The competitive cheer combines acrobatics, tumbling and dance into one routine. Bartlett said her strength is in tumbling. For the acrobatics/stunts, she is a back base. On the younger team, she said the 12- to 14-year-old team members are the fliers.
At nationals, Bartlett’s team competed against 71 other teams in their division, Small Coed 5. There were more than a thousand teams competing at the competition in many different divisions. At the world championships, her team will compete against 24 other teams from the United States, hoping to be in the top three, to then compete against teams from around the world. In order to go to the world championships, the team must qualify and be invited to the competition.
“No any team can go,” Bartlett said. “It is a super intense workout. People tend to think of cheer as what they see at a football game.”
