We gather in the stands awaiting our IU athletes to run out on the court. The game starts and cheers erupt from the crowd. Spurring us on, another IU team of athletes fly through the air and backflip across the sidelines. They are more than just our pep rally. They are the cheerleaders, defending and representing the glory of old IU.
The program consists of two teams, the Cream Co-ed Team, which has 11 males and eight females, and the Crimson All-female Team. The Crimson group consists of 33 girls, and is built similarly to a basketball team.
The team is built like a basketball team - an analogy Head Coach Julie Horine frequently uses to describe the formation of flying girls. There are flyers, main bases, side bases, and back bases, just like having a guard, forwards, and centers.
When not cheering on various IU sports on campus, the team trains and competes for their own sport’s championship, the annual UCA National Collegiate Cheerleading competition that takes place in late January.
Only 20 girls of the all-female squad are able to participate, but the entire 52-person team supports them.
Horine has been the head coach for the cheerleading squad for 26 years. She cheered on IU herself as a student here before being hired as the head coach the year she graduated.
This year the team was young and not as experienced as previous seasons, Horine says. But that didn’t stop the girls from rising to the challenge.
“The Crimson squad this year is just fantastic,” she says. “This team works hard, supports one another, and the leadership provided by the eight senior ladies is outstanding.”
For the past five years, the Crimson squad has finished in the top spots of their National championship meet.
In 2011, the team was runner-up but came back the next three years to win the National title. This year, another win looked possible, but the IU girls were barely overcome by the Alabama Crimson Tide team, earning yet another second place finish.
Horine and the other coaches, including Assistant Coach, Tony Nash, gathered the girls together after the announcement of the meet.
“We encouraged them to process that moment and then decide how we were going to prepare for next year,” Horine says. “We both let the team know that the product they put on the floor was great, and Hoosier Nation is proud of them and the work that they put into this year.”
But it is not just the score that the girls care about. It is the symbol of IU emblazoned on their uniforms. Though their official season may be over, their jobs on the court are not anywhere close to being done.
The squad returns to Bloomington to support the men’s and women’s basketball teams as well as continue on with their own practice schedules. Once other seasons begin, the squads also support the football and women’s volleyball teams.
The cheerleading season officially starts in April, where the 2015-2016 team will be picked. Once school is over, the off-season begins.
The cheerleaders, men and women, are all volunteers. They are not given any athletic sponsorship for their dedication to IU sports. Yet they continue to spend their summers training, log long hours with the travel teams, and spend weeknights trying to up the cheers in the auditorium.
In the life of an IU cheerleader, balance between cheering for IU and competing for IU can be difficult.
Horine says that all the members of the cheerleading program are dedicated to support the teams at IU, and knows that the same goes for her team. As a member of IU Athletics, the cheerleaders are also athletes that gain support for their own goals, on and off the courts.
They just do it with a bit more pomp and song.
