Chloe Edwards, Photography Editor

Is it a mountain? Is it a tower? Nope, it’s the three-person tall “pyramid stunt” of the Yale Cheerleading Team. 

The cheerleading team at Yale hails from all grades and residential colleges, but one thing they each have in common is their shared love for cheering on the Elis at regular home games and collegiate tournaments alike. 

In addition to enthusiastically waving colorful poms poms and leading chants for those in the stands, Yale Cheer keeps the audience entertained through skillful team gymnastics and stunts. 

“One really exciting thing we started doing around last year was the halftime shows at basketball games; we would do cheers, dances, stunting and tumbling to hype the crowd,” Kenna Morgan ’26 told the News. 

Nathania Nartey ’25, one of the team’s co-captains, recounts the thrill of performing complex stunts. 

Her favorite, she told the News, is the “back tuck basket toss:” a stunt where one member of the team gets tossed into the air and does a backflip. 

Many of the stunts involve intricate, airborne moves in the air, and members of the team have attested to the strong teamwork required to pull off their stunts. 

Bernadette Nwokeji ’26, who grew up doing gymnastics and color guard before joining Yale Cheer, cited the “trust team members have within each other” as the key to pulling off stunts. 

Yale Cheer’s members come from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels. Dieynaba Ndiaye ’28 may be a first year, but having started cheering at 11 years old, she comes from seven years of cheerleading experience. 

“I always romanticized cheer when I was younger, and I practiced doing flips and cartwheels at recess. The aura that surrounds cheerleading really inspired me,” Ndiaye said. 

Other team members made their cheering debut on the Yale team. Alexis Doran ’26 played four sports throughout high school, but cheered for the first time at Yale. 

“One of my friends that I met on my FOOT trip wanted to go to tryouts and didn’t want to go alone,” Doran told the News. “I went with her, and now we have been on the team for two and a half years.” 

The cheer team runs twice-a-week practices in addition to weekly game days. Last March, when the Yale Men’s Basketball team played in March Madness, the cheer team traveled to Spokane, Washington, to attend Yale’s first round matchup against Auburn. In that game, the No. 13 seeded Bulldogs pulled off an upset over the No. 4 Tigers in a back-and-forth game. 

Reflecting on her experience at March Madness, Doran highlighted the exhilaration of watching the Elis prevail in a close win up close. 

“I love watching an underdog win, I like it better when it’s Yale. It was cool to be right there in the front row, to see us win that game,” Doran said. 

Several members cited cheering on the basketball team at March Madness as one of the most thrilling moments of their cheer experience. 

Sydnee Hairston ’26 began cheering in middle school. She noted the excitement of performing in front of a crowd of over 11,000 fans. 

“It was so cool to be a part of that and perform in front of a bigger crowd. We learned a fun routine for halftime and I loved the dance elements we added,” Hairston said.

An exciting year lies ahead for Yale Cheer. As the Elis look to match last year’s success, the team is rehearsing new moves to keep the audience entertained during halftime, timeouts and breaks. 

When asked what they were looking forward to the most this year, Nwokeji pointed to the Yale-Harvard game in November.

“Harvard-Yale is always exciting because it is a rivalry that spans over a century, so it’s the game with the highest attendance from the student body,” Nwokeji told the News. 

Yale Cheer’s members also emphasized the important role of audience engagement in their cheerleading experience, encouraging the student body to show up to as many games as possible. 

“One of the best things is when you start a cheer and the whole crowd joins in and it just resounds through the Yale Bowl or John Lee Amphitheater,” Jayson Wright ’26 said.

The Yale Cheer team will perform for the first time on Oct. 5 at the Yale Football opener versus Holy Cross.