Young’s Gym held its first class on February 28, 1994. Family owned and operated in the community, Young’s is the premier and oldest gymnastics and cheerleading facility in Wake Forest and was the first gym in Wake County to offer both recreational gymnastics and All-Star cheerleading in one facility.

It was in the early years of the 1990’s that All-star cheerleading was born into what it has become today. As Young’s Gym opened in 1994, other well known All-star gyms were also opening around the state of North Carolina. In those early days, All-star cheerleading teams were made up of the best “All-star” cheerleaders from surrounding school teams that were brought together to make one talented All-star team. An All-star cheerleading team was dependent on the local school teams when searching for talented athletes. With the creation of exclusive All-star cheer gyms and gyms like ours that incorporated an All-star cheer program into their gymnastics gym, more and more talented athletes began being “home grown” within the respective gyms. Over time, the tide between school cheerleading and All-star cheerleading has shifted. Now the local school cheerleading programs are more dependent on All-star cheer programs when searching for talented cheerleaders to fill their rosters. The talent levels of athletes in cheerleading have sky rocketed over the past 20 years due in large part to All-star cheerleading programs!

The first All-star cheerleading team from Young’s was not actually called the Wake Forest All-Stars. Believe it or not, we were just Young’s All-Stars, or YA! At that time in the mid to late 1990’s there was already a successful All-Star cheerleading program called the Wake Forest All-Stars. They had quite considerable success in their own right. Towards the end of the 1990’s we made another name change to the Xtreme Team and our colors were purple and gold! Shannon Young came to the gym in 2001. By 2003, the original Wake Forest All-Star cheerleading program no longer existed so we took over the name Wake Forest All-Stars for our cheerleading program. We changed the colors to red, black, and silver.

For 10 years the Wake Forest All-star cheerleading program grew and became more and more competitive and successful. Shannon earned the respect of other cheer programs for having talented, loyal athletes and families. In 2007 Shannon and Alan had twin boys and in 2008 another boy was born in November. After a few years, Shannon decided that she wanted more time to spend with the boys so she and Alan made the decision to try and sell the Wake Forest All-star cheer program and just focus on the other programs of Young’s Gym. Unfortunately, new ownership of the All-star cheer program was not able to maintain the same organizational structure and success so the program was dismantled before the end of just one season.

At first, Shannon and Alan decided to let Wake Forest All-stars go and move forward without an All-star cheerleading program as part of Young’s Gym. However, after only a few months, Shannon received several inquiries from past parents about restarting the program and there simply weren’t very many options for Wake Forest families who wanted All-star cheerleading without having to drive considerable distances to other programs. Shannon and Alan first created the Level Up program, a mid year team similar to fall teams but with a later start to provide an option for girls finishing up their pop warner cheerleading season. By the end of that first 2013-2014 season of Level Up it became obvious that the Wake Forest All-Star cheerleading program needed to be reborn!

The 2014-2015 season was the rebirth of the program and it proved to be a successful year! We fielded 3 full season Wake Forest All-Star teams and a very large prep team!

We hope you will consider the Wake Forest All-Star cheerleading program of Young’s Gym when searching for an All-star home. And we do like to use the word “home” because we try very hard to create a family atmosphere in our gym and in our All-star cheerleading program.

Sincerely,

Alan & Shannon Young