When Stephanie Splater from Spokane Public Schools recited a list of the most popular sports for students, she offered a few of the obvious choices: volleyball, tennis, football, wrestling. But when she said cheerleading, I did a double take. Not only that, boys are participating too.
"Yeah, all of our high schools are competitive level. So you not only see them at the sidelines in traditional cheer, cheering for football, basketball, volleyball, and so on. But in February, they go and compete in Battle Ground, Washington for state titles," she said.
Most of the Spokane-area schools that compete have had success.
"Ferris is the two-time state champion in cheerleading in a category. North Central and Rogers have been champions in the last 10 years. And Shadle's program is on the rise. So right now, not only spirit cheerleading, the traditional cheerleading that we're used to, but the more competitive cheer is very popular," Splater said.
"Almost all of our teams do have both genders. That's definitely increased the athleticism as far as the categories that they compete in. So they're able to do different stunts. They have bigger teams. And they have more kids that are wanting to be involved. I think at Ferris right now, they have over 40 girls and boys who are cheerleaders," she said.
"We are lucky and we have 13," said Ferris Head Cheerleading Coach Emily Schutz. "University High School has 14. North Central, I think, has five. It's just become so much more socially acceptable to be a co-ed cheerleader that I think that it's really made it grow."
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Doug Nadvornick: How was cheerleading when you were in high school different than it is now?
Emily Schutz: That's such a funny question. I say this to people all the time. I don't even think I would have made the team if I was a cheerleader now because we focus so much more on stunting and tumbling than we did back then. Back in the early 2000s, we focused a lot on dancing and just kind of more fun crowd cheers and now our team focuses so much on leading a crowd, trying to get the crowd to yell, you know, defense, touchdown, things like that. And then we've incorporated so many male cheerleaders that our crowd really follows along with our kids now because they just really respond to co-ed stunts and co-ed cheers and the megaphones. They just, it's so different than it used to be.
DN: Why do you think it's changed in those 20 years?
ES: Honestly, I hate to say this, but I think social media has a ton to do with it because anybody can watch a video of any cheerleading stuff and so they see it and they're like, 'Oh, I want to to try this. This looks fun. I want to see if I can do this. I can flip on my trampoline in my backyard.' And so I think more kids want to try it because they see it so much more.
DN: So it's as athletic as the sports that you're promoting on the field. Tell me about the physical demands of being a cheerleader.
ES: The physical demands are so much higher than they used to be. We focus a lot on tumbling and we focus a lot on stunting. And I think a lot of times people see the finished product on the sideline. They're like, wow, that looks so easy. But I know you were just at our practice and you could see how many times it took for us to get a stunt up or this kid over here, he's trying so hard to get his flips. And it takes so much practice to put a finished product on the sideline. And even on the sideline, we're working, we're practicing our stunts, we're practicing our tumbling. The kids and a lot of our boys will work out in the gym on their off days. The girls condition, we run every practice. We really focus so much more on the kids' athleticism and their talent and their abilities.
DN: Is this one of the popular sports at Ferris High School?
ES: I would like to think it is. I do think people see our team as a leader, a leader group. It does seem like we're really pretty relevant in our school. And I think it seems like our school is proud of us. And they've really tried to celebrate us when we were going off to state. And when we came back from state, it was really cool. And we have banners now hanging in our gym that say state champions. And so I think that they do feel like we're one of the neat things to join at Ferris.
DN: Stephanie Splater was telling me that there are students who will go out and they'll do a competition during the day, and then they'll go out and do a football game or basketball game at night. Do you have a lot of that too?
ES: Yeah, the wintertime is a really busy season. Our teams cheer for two basketball games a week, sometimes two wrestling matches a week, and then we go compete on Saturday. And so we have actually really tried to keep it a little more balanced because that. To try to be a student athlete with that much of a schedule is almost impossible. So we will always do our home games. And then we usually will travel in Spokane to basketball games and we would do our home wrestling matches. And every once in a while, the kids will get a night off and we do rotate our team. So the whole team is not at every single game because trying to get your homework done on a week where you have four events plus then a Saturday competition is really hard.
DN: You've won a couple of state championships. Have some of your peer schools also reached that? Is Spokane known as a cheerleading mecca?
ES: Mead is, we like to think of them as like our sister school and they have been state champions a couple times in an all-girl division. And so we don't compete against them because they don't put co-ed and the all-girl together, but they are fantastic. And I feel like Mead has really pushed Spokane to be more of a competitive school or competitive city for cheerleading. U-High has been really fantastic too. They've placed pretty high. Cheney just placed in super hard category last year. They placed fourth out of like 20 teams in their category. They were a little bit smaller team, so they didn't compete. They have them all broken out into the right sizes and stuff, but there's been several teams that have really pushed. I think Shadle even placed fourth in their division last year. So it's, I don't want to say it's like a mecca, but we are competing big time with the West Side schools, which have been traditionally the ones who have won, you know, for 20 years. Spokane has made a run in the last five or six years.
Hailey Ditto is a senior and third-year cheerleader.
DN: So explain to me what stunting means.
Hailey Ditto: It's a group of four people. Two of them are bases. One of them's a flyer, so she's on the top, and then one of them's the back spot. I'm a side base, so I'm on the left side, and we just do all sorts of stunts. You can do it in a prep where her feet are at your chest or where your arms are extended. Or when you get better, you can do things like inversions. She's in kind of like a table position. You throw up and you catch her feet. Or my favorite, we do our full ups. So we have her in a prep or in a load, and we throw her up, and she does a spin, and then I catch her foot. That's what I love.
DN: Sounds like it's a real teamwork thing.
HD: Yeah, it definitely takes a lot of team chemistry to figure it out. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of time, but once you get it, it's a lot of fun.
Why did she join the squad?
HD: If I'm going to be honest, it's because I thought the uniforms were really cute, and I was like, that'd be cute to be on the cheer team. I didn't know it was going to be so much commitment, but I'm really glad that I joined. Me and my older sister kind of did it together.
DN: What are the skills you're good at?
HD: I love crowd leading. That's probably my favorite thing, dancing and crowd leading. And then I also love stunting like that. I feel like I've grown a lot in the last two years on like my stunting skills, which has been super fun to like grow and improve on.
Hailey Ditto’s squad mate is Eli Olney, now in his second year cheerleading.
Eli Olney: Baseball was my sport. I just loved baseball and I remember the cheer coach coming to me and saying I need you on my cheer team and I was like, 'No, no I'm not into that.' Finally baseball kind of wore off on me and she guilt tripped me by saying, 'Hey, I know your birthday's this day, so I changed the practice to the day before so you could make it.' I was, like, 'Oh man, now I gotta go.' I went to a practice and they had me stunting and I fell in love with it right then and there.
DN: So what about it do you like?
EO: Definitely I think my favorite part is the team aspect. Like, on baseball, you have friends on the team but I never really hung out with them outside of baseball. But here we're a family, especially in the winter when we're doubling down on practices. We have four- or five-hour practices, so I see most of these guys more than I see my siblings.
DN: And so you've got it looked like almost half and half girls and boys.
EO: Yeah. Pretty close to it. Last year we had, I think it was 10 boys and this year we have 14. So we're slowly growing in number. I think next year we have over half the guys leaving because it's their senior year so, hopefully, it keeps going on and more guys join.
DN: Has it become respectable for a guy to be a part of the cheerleading squad?
EO: We still get heckled every once in a while or we'll get made fun of, but, at the end of the day, we have won a state title, so no one can really say much about us. I guess I kind of learned to ignore it most of the time. Most of the people that do it don't even play sports either.
DN: As part of the stunting team what is your role?
EO: I'm the back spot, so I'm kind of like, in a sense, the leader of the group. I'm going to tell them when to when to pop, when to go up, what stunt we're doing, asking if they're ready. I'm just there to help as the backbone of the group.
DN: Tell me about the physical preparation.
EO: I used to go to the gym all the time every day for baseball and then getting into cheer, I had to get rid of my gym membership. I was here so much and it was just like so much physical stuff. Really the only stuff I work out now is cardio. We do a lot of running and then the rest of it is all just physical work you know throwing girls when I can all the stunts.
