Cheerleaders

The Boston Phoenix
October 7 - 14, 1999

[Features]

The pompon jungle

At city high schools, girls cheer to a different drummer

by Michelle Chihara
The cheerleaders at Dorchester High School aren't exactly sure why they won last year's citywide cheering championship. Daphne "Apache" Orion thinks they won because their routine did the best job of integrating dance and cheering. Gwendolyn "Gwen" Gustave disagrees. "We won 'cause of the boys," says 16-year-old Gustave, with an impish swing of her long, red-streaked braids.
But the girls don't much seem to care why they won; they're just happy they did. "Now everybody doesn't think that we're the worst school in Boston anymore," says the team captain, Maritza "Ritzy" Colon. "All the time, people are calling it `Dumbchester.' "
For anyone familiar with the regimented, competitive, and largely white world of suburban cheerleading, the Dorchester High cheerleaders -- like most urban cheerleading squads -- are something different. Yes, they sport the traditional pleated skirts and sweaters, and yes, they lead the crowd at the school's football games. But their routines owe more to breakdancing than to gymnastics. As in suburban schools, city cheerleading squads compete against each other -- but their annual competition, the Battle of the Cheerleaders, isn't even acknowledged by the state cheerleading authority.
As students at one of the city's toughest schools, which is currently on academic probation with the regional accrediting association, the Dorchester girls know that they're working against expectations. They're well aware of the negative generalizations out there -- about cheerleaders, about their neighborhood, about their school. They're just hoping to keep cheering until they've proven everyone wrong.

American cheerleading has a certain image, not entirely undeserved: think blond, suburban, preternaturally peppy. The city's Battle of the Cheerleaders that Dorchester won last year is anything but: think African-American, Latino, Haitian, Jamaican, Asian; think hip-hop influenced.
"Historically, the inner-city squads have a different style of cheerleading," says Dorchester's coach, Karen Cowans.
Depending on which squad you're talking to, city cheers might be known as "beat cheers," "step cheers," or "ghetto cheers." They're syncopated and rhythmic. A squad will get a beat going with a basic series of stomps, kicks, and claps, and then layer in a repetitive chant. At English High, they chant, "Our team is dyn-o-mite/ Our team is dyn-o-mite/Our team is tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick BOOM," with a bump 'n' grind on the boom, and a kick-step-clap rhythm underneath.
City cheering is stylistically freer than classic suburban cheerleading; one coach who prefers traditional cheering calls it more "loosey-goosey." But it's not easy to perform, and -- for reasons that sometimes have little to do with choreography -- not easy to coach.
Karen Cowans, the Dorchester coach, is also assistant headmaster at the beleaguered school. When Cowans took over the team eight years ago, she inherited a fierce, cliquish pack of girls. "I can see why people didn't want to coach it," she says. She started by introducing grade requirements, strict rules about attendance, and a ban on swearing in uniform. Then she had to teach her cheerleaders to be cheerful, or at least cordial, to the other team's squad.
Rule one: no "dis cheers." The dis cheer, a common occurrence at city games, is about putting the other team down as opposed to building your own team up. (Example: " You're not all that/We'll get you back/You think you're mean/But you're really queens.")
And that's just the beginning. Without a strict coach like Cowans, city cheering can get even nastier. Cowans says that when she first took over, the city had banned halftime at football games because two squads had gone at each other after a particularly mean exchange involving "doggie biscuits."
"There was this mentality," she says, "that everyone was here to fight."
Now the squad is past all that, but Cowans, dressed today in a power-professional gray suit and scarf, still seems tired. When she sits down in the cafeteria to watch her girls start tryouts, she drops her head into her hands at one point and sighs. She does not have time to return phone calls, and she doesn't mince words. "My girls don't always look like they're in the best shape," she says. "I've got some heavier girls. Everybody else is all one size. We got some heavier girls, but when we started to perform, they were like, `Wow, that big girl did that!'
"Inner-city girls, they don't have confidence in their abilities. There aren't enough activities for them. They cry, they say they can't do it. I have to be hard and get them beyond that."
Despite the no-nonsense approach, she's a kind of den mother to her squad. She has them over for a sleepover every year, and she's planning a trip to a haunted house this month. "I just look for perseverance, willingness mainly. Any kid that wants to try it out and who sticks to it," she says. "I see it as a confidence builder. You know, some of them have pretty screwed-up lives, and this is their only stability.
"I feel kind of bad sometimes, I wonder if I'm too hard. But they showed a lot of spirit last year. They were determined to win, they worked weekends. Sometimes they were lying to their parents to go work on the routine. They wanted to work at it, they finally gelled as a team. It was not because of me."

Cowans helped her girls see that hard work pays off; their enthusiasm is proof of that. But to get that same winning rush beyond the city limits, they have to compete against the suburban cheerleaders, and to do that they have to switch over to what the Dorchester girls call "stiff cheering."
A stiff, or suburban, cheering routine is the sort of thing you see on TV: three- to four-minute segments of tumbling, tosses, and other stunts, woven together by expressions of encouragement and a brief, separate dance segment. These routines emphasize precision: one quiver, one "bobble," and you lose five points.
By contrast, Dorchester High's routine for the urban Battle of the Cheerleaders -- which did include stunts -- lasted a good 10 minutes, and the squad danced almost the whole time. It looked great, but it was a lot harder to score than the more orderly stiff routines.
Cowans has been pushing her team toward a more suburban style, incorporating challenging stunts and stiff cheers into their routines. "They don't like 'em," says Cowans. "They stuck their lips out at first. But now that they're winners, they want to stay that way."

If Dorchester High continues in this direction, their cheerleading routines will look more like the ones at Brighton High. Thanks to an ambitious, competition-minded coach, Brighton has had a stiff-cheer program for almost a decade.
"We couldn't go out to the suburbs with beat and step cheers," says David Gonzalez, the dapper, mustachioed man who coached Brighton's cheerleaders for 10 years. "We weren't doing what they were doing, and we were being judged on those [suburban] standards."
It was not an easy transition to make. "I had a really hard time with it -- [beat] was the style they liked, it was what they were used to. It was a process of sort of weeding kids out. Beat cheers and dance take real skill, I'm not taking anything away from that, but it's a different kind of skill."
When he started, Gonzalez says, "I had 24 kids from the year before, and by the end of the season I had six. Some of them had a lot of attitude, `We do the beat cheers.' I told them, you've gotta be on, you've gotta look like one person."
Stiff cheering requires a strict conformity that goes beyond mere synchronization. "You can't embellish," says Gonzalez. "If you do a high V" -- he extends his arms into the air, above his head, to demonstrate -- "you know the girls, they sometimes want to put a hip into it, umh. That's cute, that's really cute, but you can't do it. They wanted their own flair. So I said, well, if you want to do it that way, then everyone has to do it the same way, as long as it's not sloppy. Or sexually suggestive, at all. It's gotta be at the same time, and in the same style."
When Gonzalez was building his team, he went to coaches' conferences and learned the cheers and stunts himself. "I could do everything I asked the girls to do," he says firmly. He worked his team up to high-risk stunts like "liberties" -- a move he explains by raising his arms up above his head, hands held as if grasping the foot of a girl standing with one leg extended.
"I built this from the ground floor up," he says. And by the end of his 10-year tenure, Gonzalez could boast of two Division I national bids. "I believed in competing against the best," he says.
At Brighton High tryouts this year, Gonzalez's successor, Kristy Ludwig, says, "I've got a lot to learn." Jennifer Mariano and Shanda Williams, junior-year veterans of the team, are at the front of an echoing indoor basketball court, in T-shirts and spandex. They are breaking the news to the cheering hopefuls that they will be expected to do toe-touches. "Like this," Mariano explains. "Okay, with a power-prep, so you go back, and then you bring your arms down in front, like this, and then up!!" -- and then she and Williams leap, whisking their legs up and out to the sides to meet their outstretched arms.
They land, and there's a moment of stunned silence. Then Williams bursts out laughing. "Look at you, you got your jaw all down here!"
For girls who are just being introduced to them, flying toe-touches look downright impossible. But if they want to compete outside the city, toe-touches are just the beginning.
ON GOOD years, when he had a lot of talent on his team, Gonzalez says he made it to the top of his division, taking first place out of 50 or 60 state teams. But for most city squads, especially the ones doing dance-heavy beat routines, the Olympic event is the Battle of the Cheerleaders.
Beat cheering is essentially an organic art form, something so homegrown that even its main event seems to happen spontaneously. Dorchester captain Ritzy Colon is convinced that this year's Battle will be fought on November 28; others are not so sure. The sponsor for the past few years has been Michael Bivins, of the Boston-bred hip-hop group Bel Biv De Voe. Terry Walker, Bivins's friend and last year's Battle "supervisor," says that Bivins will probably sponsor this year's Battle as well, but that it hasn't been organized yet because Bivins wants it to coincide with the release of his upcoming single in 2000.
And the Battle has, up until now, fallen completely below the radar of the state organization that regulates the rest of cheerleading. "Never heard of it," barks Jerry Silverman, the liaison for the Massachusetts Secondary School Administrators' Association. "And it's very unlikely that we wouldn't hear about it. We have contacts from around the state."
Because of new state cheerleading rules, any varsity squad that competes at a non-state-sponsored competition like the Battle is subject to a year's probation. The Battle of the Cheerleaders, in other words, is illegal by cheerleading law, which may explain Silverman's brusqueness.
But that doesn't mean much to city schools that don't expect to compete at the national or regional level. A videotape of last year's event proves that in spite of Silverman's assertion, about half a dozen high schools did participate -- and enthusiastically, at that. Held at the Reggie Lewis Athletic Center in Roxbury, the Battle had the bleachers packed to the roof with rowdy, foot-stomping kids. Terry Walker estimates that attendance was in the thousands.

Watching the tape now, in the cafeteria with the Dorchester squad, is an event unto itself. Even at almost a year's remove, the girls are right back in the moment. As the Brighton girls perform their cheer, which is relatively stiff, team captain Colon has to yell for everyone to watch. "This is what we're up against, okay?"
Just as the Dorchester team is coming on, a couple of the guys drift into the cafeteria from the football field. "It's our crew!" one of them shouts when he sees what we're watching, and then everyone is whooping and yelling "Dorchester in the house!" as the team is announced. Colon tries to hush them, and for a few minutes everyone is yelling at each other to stop yelling.
Finally, a hush falls as the opening sequence begins. The girls call it "the Pendulum." Apache Orion drops backward in a rigid trust fall that lands her in the outstretched arms of her teammates. Orion is then popped back up and falls again, three or four times, in time with the throbbing opening chords of Michael Jackson's Thriller. It's very undead-like, and it gets everyone squirming with pride and remembered excitement. The Pendulum morphs into another formation, and suddenly Orion can't stay seated. She pops up next to the TV, prompting her friends with, "Remember that day?" She does a couple of dance moves and claps. "Remember? All we did was argue. Remember when we got there? I was so scared, I was mad intimidated by those girls."
The Pendulum is not the only stunt. Cheerleaders get tossed in the air, landing in the crooked arms of their teammates, and the guys do a series of gymnastic backflips. It looks terrific and terrifying. To an outside observer, the strength of the routine lies in its seamless energy and its style. Janet Jackson's "I Get Lonely" segues into Noriega's "What What." The girls are down on their knees in a line, then fanned out into a triangle; they're martial when it's Rhythm Nation, and just getting down when it's Will Smith's "Gettin' Jiggy With It."
Once the dancing gets going, the squad can't contain its enthusiasm any longer, and everyone who remembers the moves springs up and launches into the routine, narrating softly , "And turn," "Step touch," "Oh oh, it's this part, remember?" "Yeeeaaah . . . " Bump with the right hip, one hand at the waist, step touch, two stiff shoulder breaks, full-body roll, and cries of "Dor-ches-ter ba-bee!!!"
This is not canned enthusiasm, and it would not pass David Gonzalez's "nothing suggestive" test. This is hip-hop dancing, with a low center of gravity and isolated ribcages and shoulders. It's sexy. It's black. It's anything but "stiff."
And last year, for all of Brighton's traditional crispness, Dorchester won.

Cheerleading, at the fanatic national level, has acquired a kind of existential absurdity: it's a little odd to cheer for cheering's sake alone. That's not to say that it's not challenging -- stunting is enormously dangerous, and if a squad wants to win, there's no room for mistakes.
Organized cheerleading is also strange because it judges girls on how well they conform to a rigid, rather forced definition of what happy looks like. A national-level cheer routine is an out-of-context expression of spirited encouragement broken down into graded 10-point categories such as "vocal pitch" and "dismounts." It's extremely impressive, and slightly uncanny. And that's another way that Dorchester's performance last year sets it apart from the suburbs. If there's one thing that the Dorchester girls exude, it's a very warm, very human joy. The style that made them champions has them dancing more than they are stunting, and dance has always been one way to express human delight. They danced, last year, with a distinct sense of discovery, a sense of wonder at what they were accomplishing. Stiff cheering, as it finds its way into the city, may in fact offer these girls a new playing field, a new way to test their mettle against teams from the suburbs. But it will not be the same as what they did at the Battle of the Cheerleaders. Last year the girls on the Dorchester squad were cheering for themselves, and it showed.
Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.