Thankfully, she received much
needed support from a couple of
coaches. “They just took me under
their wings and showed me what to
focus on and what to make a priority
to have a great team,” she said. She
joined the Georgia Cheerleading
Coaches Association and later trained
to become an official for the Georgia
High School Association (GHSA),
which qualified her to serve as a judge
at cheerleading competitions. The
experience as a judge provided her
with greater understanding of the
scoring process, and gave her insight
on what components to focus on when
forming her own team and planning
choreography.
In 2000, Ann Michele took
a position teaching chemistry at
Vidalia Comprehensive High School.
Even though she continued to judge
competitions, she had no plans to ever
coach cheer again. But when Phyllis
James and Jan Barfield, the present
coaches, asked if she would take over
the program at Vidalia, she realized
Dublin had only been the beginning of
a new and unplanned venture.
In just a year’s time at Vidalia, Ann
Michele became Head Cheerleading
Coach of all three teams: football
cheerleading, basketball cheerleading,
and competitive cheerleading. “Many
of the girls were on all three teams
when I first started coaching,” she
said. “But as competitive cheerleading
gained popularity, adjustments were
made by the Georgia High School
Association giving more flexibility on
how teams could be organized.”
Ann Michele met the challenge
full-on. “I aligned myself with
experts in the sport and made great
connections with others in the GCCA.
I really wanted to learn from the
best.” She also identified schools with
successful cheer programs and used
them for models to build her own
program at Vidalia High School.
The history of organized
cheerleading in America goes back
to the late 19th century when the
University of Minnesota appointed
a team of six “yell leaders” led by
Johnny Campbell. That’s right—the
first cheerleaders were a group of
guys. Cheerleading would continue to
be an all-male sport until 1923 when
the University of Minnesota agreed
to allow female students to join since
there was no other collegiate sport
for females at the time. Sad to say,
other colleges were slow to follow their
example. The shift from male to female
cheerleaders didn’t occur until the
1940s when WWII took many of the
male students off to war.
Lawrence Herkimer’s Cheer Camps
reinvented cheerleading in 1948.
Herkimer had been a cheerleader at
Southern Methodist University in
Dallas. Cheerleaders may recognize
his name for the “Herkie Jump,”
something he said he did quite on
accident. He founded the National
Cheerleaders Association (NCA) and
invented (and patented) the pompon.
(The pompon is often incorrectly called
a pompom. Pompon is French for
“ornamental tuft.”) He also founded
both the Cheerleader Supply Company
and the Universal Cheerleaders
Association (UCA).
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