UEA Angels – Sports Team of the Year!

The UEA Angels Cheerleading Squad have been reeling in the successes, not only in the past few weeks, but in the past year or so too. This was recognised with our recent win at the Union Awards, which has brought attention to one of UEA’s most successful societies.

In case you missed us, and you’ll allow us to momentarily blow our own horn, here’s a rundown on some of last year’s achievements:


- The Dance squad, coached by Ana Crayton, Kathryn Smith and Laura Beaumont, entered two national university competitions. We took home two national trophies, from Manchester in March 2011 coming second out of six university teams.


- In April, we competed at BCA (The British Cheerleading Associations) national championships in Telford and placed first, beating Warwick Devils and BCU tigers.


- The Stunt team, coached by Danielle French, Rachel Cullen and Kate Kenneally, had a fantastic year as well. They won against Essex at Derby Day and competed in the university national championships, placing 7th out of 18 teams in a very tough category.


- The Angels did the university proud at Derby Day as well last year, contributing to our outstanding win. Not to mention performing at a handful of university events including the Union Awards.


- We also took two teams to Rimini in Italy to compete against other universities in friendly competition. This was a great celebratory end to a great year!

As you might imagine, the pressure was on this time round, for both the old girls and the new. However we still won second place at inter-university competition ICC (International Cheerleading Coalition), a few weeks ago. The new team, led by Laura Beaumont, Zoe Bradshaw and Grace Bayfield, were on fire and continued flying high… yes I went there. Although, the stunt girls at Derby Day literally were!

If we haven’t won you over yet with our glittering pom poms and trophies, or you’re still feeling inclined to whip out your Cloak of Judgement and start quoting lines from Bring It On…maybe our nationally recognized cheesy grins can persuade you.

It is likely that you will recall, unless you live under a Facebook-deprived rock, the ‘absolutely insane effort’ (according to Student Sport Magazine), we all put into winning their ‘Cheer Face Competition’. This was a collection of photos showing off some rather impressive grins from the performances, which were gathered together to compete for a feature in Student Sport Magazine.

We managed to get a total of over 800 ‘likes’, after sharing the link on the pages of almost every UEA club and society imaginable, so we will be tapping ourselves on the back for that.

We may have exhausted ourselves a little, but the Angels have got a busy month or so ahead of us. We will be opening the new Gymnastics Centre at the Sportspark next week, as well as returning to BCA in April (hoping that we will make it a hat trick and win the national championship for the third year in a row!).

Later next month we’ll finally be heading off to Spain on tour for some much needed fun in the sun. Hopefully we’ll continue to do the coaches, the society and UEA proud.

If you fancy witnessing our dancing in action (or our poorly concealed bums in those lovely blue numbers!) Be sure to come along to the Open Mic Night being held in the Drama Studios on the 25th of March. You won’t be disappointed!