New Mexico Club Cheer

New Mexico Club Cheer Is Building Confident, Ready-for-Life Athletes

There's a gap in Albuquerque's youth sports landscape that most people never think about, but Brandy Ansotigue and Kasey Teske noticed it immediately. On one side, recreational cheer programs offer a low-key introduction to the sport, but not much in the way of serious skill development. On the other hand, All-Star programs deliver elite-level training with elite-level time commitments and travel schedules to match. Somewhere in the middle, a whole generation of kids with real potential for high school cheerleading was slipping through the cracks. Brandy and Kasey decided to do something about it.

New Mexico Club Cheer, or NMCC, was born from that realization. Both women came into the venture with deep roots in the Albuquerque cheer community. Brandy is a born-and-raised Albuquerque native who cheered at El Dorado High School, went on to cheer four years at UNM, and then spent 13 years coaching at both La Cueva and El Dorado, racking up metro and state championship titles along the way. She's attended seven national competitions and has never, by her own account, really left the cheer world since she first stepped onto a mat in middle school. Today she also teaches business at the college level, bringing an entrepreneurial mindset to everything she builds. Kasey moved to Albuquerque at age four and has called it home ever since. She cheered at La Cueva and started coaching at nineteen, coaching at various local high schools as well as in Virginia when she lived in DC for a few years. She attended UNM where she received two bachelors degrees and a master’s in education, later serving as the all-girl cheer coach at UNM and moving on to own and operate her own All-Star gym. Kasey has always made sure her career schedule aligned with her passion of coaching cheer. She is currently a licensed mortgage broker and has been a yoga and fitness instructor for over 10 years. Between these two passionately driven ladies, NMCC is built on more than 40 years of combined experience at every level of the sport.

The two connected through the cheer world and a shared circle of friends, and when a group of their daughters expressed interest in cheering together, the partnership became official. They started by coaching a youth team and quickly identified what they wanted to build: a program structured around four-month seasons, professional coaching, and a singular purpose of preparing young athletes for high school cheerleading. That focus on high school is intentional: both owners have watched rosters shrink at programs across the city, with C-teams and JV squads disappearing from schools that once ran three full squads. The culprit, in their view, is a sports landscape with so many club options that kids are being pulled away from their school programs entirely. One of NMCC's goals is to reverse that trend.

Rebuilding the high school pipeline

The way they've structured the fall season reflects that mission: rather than organizing teams by age group alone, NMCC builds feeder teams directly tied to Albuquerque's high schools. A child whose elementary school feeds into La Cueva joins the La Cueva team, wears La Cueva colors, learns La Cueva fight songs and chants, and trains with the same routines and expectations they'll encounter at tryouts. By the time they walk into that gym as an 8th grader, they know what to expect and the experience is familiar. NMCC's senior athletes also go through a structured mock tryout process, complete with judges and score sheets, so the real thing holds no surprises. The results are already speaking for themselves: in the most recent tryout cycle, every single NMCC athlete who tried out for La Cueva made a team.

The program currently trains at The Field House on Paseo Del Norte, an indoor facility with a full nine-panel dead mat floor, the same surface athletes compete on, rather than the spring floors common in gymnastics and All-Star gyms. Coaches are hired, vetted, background-checked, and paid, a meaningful distinction from the volunteer-based model that most recreational programs rely on. For families whose kids aren't quite ready for the competitive track, the Sideline Spirit Academy offers a gentler on-ramp: a K-3rd grade program where athletes learn chants, sidelines, and crowd leadership by actually cheering at live basketball and volleyball games.

Big Goals and Bright Futures

This summer, NMCC is launching what they're calling Cheer Leadership Camps: guest speakers from the local cheer, nutrition, and business communities will come in to talk to athletes about leadership, teamwork, coachability, and wellness. Brandy, who sees college students walk into her classroom without basic professional communication skills, wants to start building those habits early. Looking further ahead, the organization is also preparing to launch Cheer Abilities, an inclusive program designed for athletes with special needs, giving them the same opportunity to learn skills, cheer at games, and compete.

The bigger vision is a feeder team for every high school in Albuquerque and Rio Rancho, and a new dedicated facility, more centrally located and better suited to the program's growth, is already in the works.

What Brandy and Kasey are building is more than a cheer club - it's a long-term investment in the confidence, character, and athletic futures of Albuquerque's young people. For more info, visit nmclubcheer.com.