Saturday Clearlake Christmas Parade to feature high school standouts as grand marshals
- LAKE COUNTY NEWS REPORTS
- Posted On
CLEARLAKE, Calif. – Come out and celebrate the holidays with the annual Christmas parade and tree lighting ceremony in Clearlake on Saturday, Dec. 9.
The lighted parade will begin at 6 p.m. from Redbud Park and end at Austin Park.
This year the grand marshals are Lower Lake High School seniors Haylee Wade and Hoku-Lani Wickard, who were chosen due to their great academic and athletic achievements.
Wade has been cheerleading for four years at Lower Lake High School. Her team recently qualified for the California state and the national cheer competitions this year. They will travel to Bakersfield for the state competition and Las Vegas for the National competition. Her team is working hard so that they can bring another national title back to our community in 2018.
She was the runner up for the Cheerleader of the Year in Cheerleader magazine in 2015. Her competition cheer team just won first place in San Francisco at the Slam City cheer competition on Dec. 2.
Wade has always kept a 4.0 grade point average throughout high school and plans on attending college where she would like to study nursing and sports medicine. Part of her college decision will be based on the cheer team at the school as she plans on continuing cheerleading while in college.
She has applied to several University of California and California State Universities. She has also been in contact with colleges outside of California that offer athletic scholarships to cheerleaders as well.
A competition cheer team practices almost year round. Getting a team ready to compete with the best high schools out there takes a lot of time and dedication. When not in practice, she spends her time either in the gym, studying or helping the youth cheer program with tumbling and choreographing their competition routines and mixing music to go along with them.
Wickard is a senior at Lower Lake High School. He has a 4.2 grade point average and he plays three sports: football, basketball and track.
Wickard’s main sport is football and he plans on going to a four-year college to play on scholarship, of which he currently has three.
His plan is to major in either psychology or sociology.
He has helped out with youth football, as well as youth basketball in the community to teach kids that they must be good people as well as good athletes.