Monday, January 20, 2025
Hard work and dedication paid off for the Seaford varsity cheer team last month, when it captured the New York State Public High School Athletic Association’s Game Day Championship in Class C, after winning the Class B title in 2023.
In the competition, which took place at Hudson Valley Community College in upstate Troy, the Seaford squad went up against 8 other teams from high schools of similar size across the state.
Preparing for the competition as defending champions, the girls were well aware of how much work they needed to do to win again, coach Lisa Ferrari said. “Coming in as a state champ, you feel more pressure to keep that up and to continue last year,” she said. “We didn’t necessarily know what to expect. We just hoped for the best.”
Ferrari has coached the squad for 17 years, she said, and has always been competitive. Cheerleading, she said, is a unique sport that doesn’t involve going head to head with another team. Instead, the competition focuses on one squad at a time.
“We always kind of preach to them and have them focus on themselves, and not about their competition, not about any other team,” Ferrari said.
The Seaford team represented Nassau County’s Section 8 in the state Class C contest on Nov. 10, a week after it won the county championship. The team comprises 21 athletes who spend three hours a day, six days a week, perfecting their routines.
After all nine squads in Class C performed in a preliminary round, the top three qualifiers — Seaford, Putnam Valley and Chenango Forks — did so again in the finals. In a unique situation this year, two reigning champs competed against each other: Seaford was in Class B in 2023, while Putnam Valley won Class C.
Seaford cheerleader Hayley Kern, a senior, said it was difficult to predict which defending champions would win.
“Right before we went off to finals, we watched them go,” Kern said of Putnam Valley. “We’re like, ‘They’re good. We just hope to be better.’ I feel like it was the most competition we’ve had.”
The performances, Ferrari explained, are broken into four segments emulating a game day, with band chants, regular and situational sideline cheers, and a fight song. Similar to a football game, announcers called out specific scenarios, such as first downs and touchdowns, and judges graded the cheerleaders on their performance.
“It was very exciting,” Seaford senior Melissa Phieffer said. “We knew exactly what we had to do from last year, and we knew we had to get the crowd excited and engage with them. We knew we had to put on a show, and that’s exactly what we did.”
The Seaford squad was the last to perform in both the prelims and finals, which Ferrari said carried an “extra weight,” because every other team was waiting to see what the defending champions would do.
“Your competition has already gone before you, and now you need to do better than them,” Ferrari said. “You feel that pressure, because everybody’s kind of just staring at you, waiting to see what you’re going to do.”
Seaford’s score of 90.10 in the finals beat out Putnam Valley by .20 points.
“All of our hard work finally paid off,” Seaford senior Codi Kasparian said. “We went in there not knowing what would happen, because we did go against another team that was a state champ last year, too, and they probably worked just as hard.”
The cheer team has a strong work ethic, Ferrari said, and trains harder than any athletes she knows. She and assistant coach Brenda Martin dedicated many hours as well to make sure the team performed its best.
“As a coach, I’m just very proud of them,” Ferrari said. “We work hard, me and my assistant coach, Brenda, and you just hope that all of that work and all of those hours and the labor will pay off.”
