Plymouth Marjon’s cheerleading team, Marjon Mambas, are a competition and spirit team who perform nationally and locally within the university. The team has been a society for only a small number of years and in that time, it has enlarged to a squad of 20 members during this academic year.
Jordan Carroll, who is the captain has been on the team for three years and in that time has witnessed it develop and change. From not completely rehearsing a routine before walking onto the competition floor to now feeling confident within his team to perform well and achieve high scores. He believes Marjon cheer has had a successful season, by being rewarded with first place at the Revolution competition in Doncaster and fourth in the BCA University Nationals 2025 in Telford. Jordan said this season “was the best in my entire three years at Marjon that we’ve done on the floor, and I came off so proud.”.
His reasonings for going for cheer captain were to bring stability to the team, to focus on health and safety in particularly, of whether the cheerleader themself feels they can perform and stunt or not (which he decided through personal experience), to come together as a community and open other opportunities that may not have been thought about or opened in previous years, such as coaching, which Jessie Todd, who has also been on the team for three years, acted as this year. Having looked back on this, Jordan firmly believes he achieved his goals.
However, his experience this role has not been the easiest: “I’ve not really enjoyed being captain because I think, it’s a lot of fun and it’s really rewarding, but equally at the same point it’s really hard being the judge, jury and executioner and the person everyone comes to. Everyone has someone else they can go to and there’s no one I can go to.”. He further explained that he feels a lot of pressure to make sure everything is going well all the time and has expressed that this has made him less inclined to run for cheer captain for the next academic year.
Nevertheless, having seen this year’s team flourish, Jordan has expressed his future aspirations for the cheer saying he wants the competition team “to get to the point where we could do a competition like we did in Telford and come first, or not even necessarily come first, just to really, like, go out and do a clean routine”. His further ambitions for the cheer team overall in the future include advertising our regular socials and fundraisers, which will be done on their TikTok and Instagram pages to be “the biggest society on campus”, which Jordan thinks is “attainable”.