Sixteen years ago, Lynne and Alan Shearer opened the first location of Woodlands Elite Cheer Co. and have since expanded the gym to offer all-star cheerleading and tumbling across the Greater Houston area.

Lynne Shearer said they first started Woodlands Elite Cheer in The Woodlands after learning the gym their daughter was attending was failing.

“I can’t believe we’ve been doing it for 16 years now,” Shearer said. “We have kids from ages 3 to 18, and we start with a tiny tumblers class for 3- to 5-year-old kids. We usually have anywhere between 900 to 1,200 kids in the recreational tumbling program, and that is just at this location.”

The initial location of Woodlands Elite Cheer was on Budde Road until the Shearers built a bigger gym in Oak Ridge North. The gym now offers gymnastics and cheer programs in Magnolia, Humble and Katy.

Shearer said the energy of the groups and the coaches are what make Woodlands Elite Cheer so different from other gyms in the area.

“We are different from a gymnastics facility; they are usually very strict, and there’s no music playing,” she said. “At our gym, there [are] all these different things going on; there’s music and there’s just a good energy to it. It’s mostly the energy of our coaches. They are amazing at what they do.”

While children in each community attend the closest gym available for tumbling classes, the gym’s all-star cheerleading program attracts competitors from all over the Greater Houston area, she said.

“We have really built a name for ourselves in the all-star industry over the past 16 years,” Shearer said. “We have 40 all-star teams this season at all four of our locations, with 20 teams at this location. It is our biggest [all-star program] for sure.”

Shearer said she would like to see more participants from The Woodlands and Oak Ridge North communities to reflect a larger presence from the local community.

“It’s funny because a lot of kids drive a long way to get here just to be on a team here,” she said. “It started out years ago, that it was more of a community thing, and now it’s all of Houston, like Pasadena, Beaumont and Katy.”