After this school year, Junction City High School will be losing two cheer coaches. Sadly, Rachel Kelly is moving to Kansas City with family and Yvonne Warren resigned after serving diligently for six years. Next year, in replacement, Alicia Goheen, will be the new head cheer coach.

“I’m most excited for the relationships with the students, I don’t think you can come into a job such as coaching for any other reason than relationships. I mean it just doesn’t make sense, if you’re interacting with people all day you want to see them grow and perform and do well. I have high expectations for our cheerleaders. We can do and be a great squad,” said Coach Alicia Goheen

Coach Alicia Goheen has never been a coach before, but she has a lot of background experience with organizing groups and events.

“I’m excited about learning the technical aspects of cheer. Obviously I don’t have any experience cheering myself but my assistant coaches do. Coach Talley cheered here at Junction City High School and then went on to cheer in college. Coach Whaley was a cheer coach previously and provides great wisdom for our team. I’m going to be relying on them quite a bit, however, in my previous careers as a graphic designer and as a public relations analyst, we organized teams and events” said Coach Goheen

There have been some changes to the cheering structure.“The biggest change to the program is that we used to have more squads. This year we’ve condensed to a Varsity and JV” She said.

This year the squads were chosen based on talent in a fiercely competitive tryout.

“As far as numbers go, we didn’t put a number on it, we really wanted to just look and see what skill sets were there. We’ll never have a point where we say only this many cheerleaders.”

Coach Goheen emphasized the selection process was difficult.

“This year we had a phenomenal group of students that tried out and it was extremely competitive.”said Coach Goheen “We selected those who would work together to  make the best squad together with the potential to learn and grow.”

We’ll all be looking forward to what Coach Alicia Goheen will be capable of doing with the cheer team next year. Watch the cheer team in action next year in the home games!