I came home from school one day in fifth grade and begged my mother to sign me up for our town’s youth league cheerleading program. At this point, I had participated in a number of extracurriculars: softball, ballet, and baton twirling, each for no more than a year. I imagine my mother assumed that cheerleading would be short-lived as well. In fairness to her, the primary reason I wanted to join cheerleading was not because I had any clue what a cheerleader was or did, but because my best friend Brooke was on the team, and Brooke’s 3x weekly cheer practices conflicted with our frequent playdates. In all honesty, I just wanted to do what Brooke was doing (which was what explained my interest in softball, which I wasn’t very good at anyway…)
So at 11 years old, I became a cheerleader for the blue and white. The difference this time, however, was that something about cheerleading ignited me. Not only did I stay with the town team through the end of middle school, I went on to cheer in high school, and I eventually enjoyed a long coaching career in all levels of cheer: youth, JV and Varsity.
To build context for this post, I want to go back and examine the leadership style of a woman who was deeply influential to me in this process. I first met the commissioner of our community’s youth cheerleading program at 10 years old. I remember her as a strict, all-business woman who took a tremendous amount of pride in the award-winning program she had helped to build. We were good… we were REALLY good! In my “senior” year on the 13-year-old team, the Bulldogs took first place in every competition we attended, including the SUPER awesome LICA (Long Island Cheerleading Association) competition that was held annually at Nassau Community College.
Her daughter, a year older than I, attended my high school. When it was time for me to try out for the varsity team, her mom had stepped in to serve as assistant coach.
To say that Coach helped to take our cheer program to the proverbial “next level” was an understatement. She coached with the same all-business discipline that set the standard at North Babylon. Though cheer was typically a fall/winter activity, we practiced year-round. Oftentimes practice included grueling conditioning exercises intended to build strength and endurance. We spent our “off season” attending stunt clinics and camps, and our Varsity team, in 1995, was the first from our high school granted permission to attend a national competition in Nashville, TN.
Though I grew up with Coach, to an extent, she was not my “buddy” at practice. She was not warm, nor did she ever entertain any excuses as to why my individual (or collective team’s) performance was not to her expectation. I went to every single practice ready to work, even as I was battling a significant Crohn’s Disease flare and sometimes had to excuse myself to the locker room to throw up. The minute I came back into the gym, I went right back to my stunt group and kept working.
If at any time we stepped out of line, either as youth cheerleaders or as high school cheerleaders, Coach’s shouting would send icicles through our veins and snap us back to attention. Sometimes we were disciplined with extra conditioning: additional push ups, crunches, or jumps drills… one or two laps around the track. Late practices. Additional practices. And if we dared “fight back” (not that it was even a conceivable option), Coach had no problem benching us. Nobody on that team was irreplaceable, in her eyes. Knowing that kept us working our hardest.
I loved and respected her, but I probably also feared her. Regardless, I always thought she was an effective coach because I always knew that my teams were good. I felt lucky and honored to be a part of two very successful programs. I credited both to her.
Flash forward to 2002:
I begin my first year teaching English at a public high school, and I immediately expressed interest in working with the cheerleading program. I had been coaching a youth team since my senior year in high school, and I was ready for something more. As chance would have it, the existing varsity coach at Smithtown High School was expecting her first child. She welcomed my attendance at practice as a “helper,” and I imagined that someday I would be her official assistant coach, or maybe even head coach myself.
But I received an unexpected phone call on a cold December morning. The varsity coach had gone into early labor, and the team had a competition that day. Could I meet them on the bus and take them to the competition in her place?
That’s the day I became head coach of Smithtown Varsity Cheerleading.
I finished out the year with the team, who were sad to have lost their beloved coach to motherhood, but were also optimistic about a future with me. While I ran the remaining practices, I had nothing to do with existing choreography or stunt groups. I didn’t make too many changes. This was her team still, not mine…
My colleague never came back to school, so not only was I set to coach moving forward, I could operate on a clean slate without “ghosts” from the past (or so I thought). I was beyond elated at the idea and immediately got to work, spending lots of time thinking about the most effective ways to run practice, about stunts and choreography, about new uniforms. Basically everything I had learned about running a competitive cheer program came from my own experiences with a coach, Robyn Woisin. I knew her approach worked, so I planned to do what I believed she would have done.
What I didn’t do was stop to think about the kids.
The members of the 2003-2004 varsity team were talented and capable, but they were not used to the level of hard work that I wanted from them. For me, cheer was life, and everything else was secondary. For them, cheerleading was something fun they did after school and on weekends, but it was not going to conflict with other important things they had going on.
Perhaps I was too immature at the time or simply couldn’t fathom “cheerleading” in any other way, but my approach with that team was tremendously unsuccessful. I butt heads with the kids, the parents, and even the athletic director… over what I thought were non-negotiable keys to success for a winning program. I came in there with my own mental model (as Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline would say) or my own preconceived notion of what “should be” based on my own experience as a cheerleader with a demanding coach. My implicit bias stymied communication within the organization I was attempting to lead, and I failed.
Actually, I think most of the kids on that team ended up hating me. And I don’t blame them.
I was demoted to JV the following year, replaced by someone from another program who had far more coaching experience than I did, and she had come with a completely different style and approach. While I was upset at the time, I later came to understand why the demotion was the best thing for me. While my pride took a hit, I was able to take a hard look at what I had done wrong: I completely ignored the culture. I had come in with an ego-driven agenda, and I assumed that everyone was going to be on board. I assumed that MY vision was also THEIR vision. Not once did I ask if they were “all in” with me. Not once did I seek to understand before I could be understood. I didn’t “listen” to them (or interpret their thinking through action, or inaction). I thought, on my own, I could take an already-talented team and make them superstars. I thought that’s what they wanted.
I realized that I tried to break into an already-established culture and make sweeping changes with my wrecking-ball. It was incredibly naive of me to think like this because I never had buy-in. Not from them.
But luckily that next year coaching the Smithtown “JV Blue” team was different. In fact, it was undoubtedly my most successful year as a coach. Without knowing it then, I, with my team and their parents, had engaged in a form of presencing that Otto Scharmer describes as connecting deeply to our identity and our purpose to “allow the future to emerge from the whole rather than from a smaller part…” That smaller part would have been my own ego that tripped me up the previous year.
I opened up to this group of 9th and 10th graders about my vision for the team, but I also endeavored to lean more about them and what THEY wanted from me, their coach. I began to see the “team” as a whole made up of parts: me the coach, the kids, their parents, our athletic director, the school. In the fall season, the team began to crystallize by committing ourselves to learning, growing, and working as hard as we could. The goals we set for ourselves were incredibly energizing and motivating. Unlike my varsity team the year before, this group of kids was accepting of my “tough love” approach. At the same time, I was learning and growing myself, and I quickly learned how far “tough love” would get me with different individuals, as some kids responded to softer, more patient approaches. We continued to work with my established cadre of cheer-industry professionals for tumbling instruction and choreography, who were also energized by this team’s confidence and grit. Similarly to my own experience in 1993, the JV Blue team ended up having an undefeated competition season, and they easily won Long Island JV Finals. I was even able to take them to Nationals. To date, no other Smithtown JV team has been permitted to attend a national competition. We were very lucky.
After that one year with JV Blue, Smithtown High School split into East and West campuses. I was appointed Varsity coach at West, which is where I coached until I eventually “retired” in 2009 to focus on finishing my administrative degree. In that remaining time, I worked with first-place teams and last-place teams, good kids and troublesome kids. Some of the girls I’ve coached have grown up to become colleagues and lifelong friends. But – as many teams as I coached throughout the years, none was quite like the JV Blue team from 2004-2005. In my opinion, that was the year I finally learned how to coach.
Cheerleading is still a big part of my life today. My involvement with the Section VIII and Section XI officials associations, CHSAA and the New York State Cheerleading Judges Association connects with that love of cheer that I developed at 11 years old. It wasn’t until reading Chapter 1 of Futures-Based Change Leadership by Dr. Richard Bernato, one of my professors at St. John’s University, that I made a connection to the leadership theories of Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer to coaching cheerleading. In the middle of writing this blog post, I connected to one of the earliest texts I read on leadership (and one of my favorites), Principle-Centered Leadership by Stephen Covey. To an extent, I think a lot of these theories are intuitive. Today, with the benefit of continual learning, I can articulate how the mistakes I made and the changes that followed connect to leadership theories. It’s an “a-ha” moment that arrived a little late…but at least it arrived.
Inside the Launch Window 