Sandy Han has coached cheerleading in Kingston since she was a Queen’s University student. More than three decades later, she continues to champion the sport for local young athletes.
The science teacher at Regiopolis-Notre Dame Catholic Secondary School is one of a kind: she’s the only high school cheer coach in the area.
“I retired in 2021 [from cheer coaching] but I’m back now, because we lost our cheer program at Regi last year. The way it was running, it couldn’t sustain itself. I didn’t want to see it die completely, so I said, ‘I’m going give it one year out of retirement and rebuild it, make it what it used to look like when I was coaching here 20 years ago.”
From St. Thomas to Team Canada
Han moved to Kingston in 1994 from St. Thomas, Ontario, to attend teacher’s college.
“I coached Queen’s University and Holy Cross Secondary School and then started Kingston Elite (cheerleading) in 2006,” she says.
While she sold Kingston Elite in 2022 to a former cheer athlete, Han still coaches at the club.
Han has made a name for herself as a cheer coach nationally. In 2013, she was named coach of the year by Cheer Evolution, a national organization for competitive cheerleading. Han went on to lead Team Canada from 2014 until 2022.
The start of a lifelong passion
Han discovered cheerleading in high school, and the sport helped her gain confidence.
“I was a kid who had no self-esteem, and I was just scared of everybody and everything. It wasn’t until I made the cheer team that I started developing self-confidence. I got so much benefit from it and the friendships I made, and then the athleticism developed.”
It was just natural for Han to pass on her love of the sport after her days of competing came to a close.
“I felt the need to share that that sense of joy, that sense of community with as many kids as I could possibly teach it to,” she says.
“The first time I ever coached was in Grade 11 at my high school in St. Thomas. And then when I came to Kingston, I was only supposed to be here for one year.”
Han ended up coaching Queen’s for 18 years while teaching high school, first at Holy Cross Catholic Secondary School and now at Regi, where she has 21 participants.
Building opportunities for a new generation
Now in the last few years of her teaching career, Han is trying to rebuild the sport at the grassroots level, since competitive cheer isn’t as popular as it once was.
“It can be a full-contact sport,” Han says, referring to the injuries that athletes sustained from performing the jumps, tumbles, and flips. “That’s the reason why a lot of schools around the provinces aren’t supporting it anymore.”
So she is building back the sport with a new format, called “Game Day.”
“This routine isn’t meant to be so acrobatic,” she says. “It’s more supposed to be more like school spirit at a football game. It’s mostly tumbling now, crowd interaction and cheering, like actual cheerleading. So, it’s going back to its roots.
“It morphed into a competitive sport with a lot of acrobatics, and that still, of course, exists. But in Ontario, we’re actually trying to do grassroots OFSSA (provincial high school championship) cheerleading.” Regiopolis Notre-Dame will host the OFSSA cheerleading regionals on March 31.
Han has another goal for the future of cheer. “We want to try to do is make high school cheerleading more accessible, much cheaper,” she says. “Clubs are quite expensive because they travel so much. We want to make it so that any kid who wants to learn how to do this can afford to be able to do school cheer.”
It’s also important for Han to promote self-esteem and confidence with her students. And it shows.
“She is my biggest inspiration for what I want to be like when I’m older,” says first-year cheerleading member Juliana Barsoum, 16.
“She’s very organized and knows exactly how she wants us to be positioned and knows what we’re supposed to do and exactly what it’s supposed to look like in the end,” Barsoum continues. “She’s encouraging, she makes sure that we’re included, and she sets boundaries but in a good way. Everyone has to participate; everyone has to be treated equally.
“She just knows how to bring us together.”
Barsoum says that it’s telling that the connections Han has made with her students are so long-lasting.
“A lot of her former students want to come coach us now. I think that says enough about her character and how she has an imprint on people.”
Han loves seeing how her students find new skills through cheerleading, just as she did in high school, from social skills to resiliency.
“It helps you understand how to push yourself past the boundaries of what you think you can do. That just sets you up for life.”
