History

In 2010, a few parents of Coon Rapids High School competition cheerleaders joined the Booster Club for the Coon Rapids competition cheer team. The next year, we served on the board, and later, we set up the Club as a nonprofit organization.

Our daughters had a great experience with competition cheerleading. They developed lifelong friendships, learned teamwork, commitment, perseverance, and leadership. They earned trips to Florida for national competitions as a reward for their hard work. They had FUN! Along the way, our love of cheer grew, too.

After our girls graduated, we continued to run the Booster Club. But, now we had a vision. A vision of starting our own program that could help build a love for the sport of cheerleading in others. A vision of providing skills training at an affordable price so students could start learning earlier, and a vision that those students would feed into area schools to make those teams even more competitive. That way, they could have an opportunity to have a positive experience like our daughters had. And, eventually, maybe, we could even have our own teams that could compete at the all-star level. We had become life-long “cheer moms.”

To accomplish all that, we began a charitable gambling operation, called Competition Cheer Spirit Booster Club, to support our program. Our gambling operation now has 24 employees and is a $18 million organization as of our last fiscal year, and we are the #1 gambling operation in Coon Rapids.

In June 2020 – in the middle of the pandemic – we hired Kolleen Raymond to be our program director. She started in July and immediately began building a program that fit our vision, and AMP Athletics was born. On August 12, 2021, AMP Athletics had its Grand Opening; and now, our dream is alive! Now that AMP is its own entity, they are considered a pillar grantee of CharitAbleMN.

In the years to come, we are looking forward to doing much, much more for AMP; and making more donations to support competitive cheer programs and other youth athletics, or programs that support the care and well-being of youth in Coon Rapids and the surrounding communities.

That’s our story!