‘Marine-style hazing’, poverty wages and lifelong injuries: The sad, secret life of cheerleaders

Though it looks glamorous, the life of a professional cheerleader for the NFL or NBA is often demanding, dangerous and demeaning. Holly Baxter reports on the experiences of the lowest-paid people on the field

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At the Super Bowl on Sunday, there will be a number of people on the field besides the players. Besides the mascots, the waterboys, the referees, the coaches, the medical teams, and the half-time show celebrities, another group of athletes will travel in with the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles: the cheerleaders. Chiefs Cheer and the Philadelphia Eagles Cheer Squad — formerly known as the Eaglettes and the Liberty Belles — will be performing athletic feats for which they have trained over a number of years (the Chiefs feature one cheerleader who is in her sixth year of representing the team, and multiple fifth-year performers.) Such squads often practice for 40 hours a week, all through the season. Their high-impact exercise routines come with a very real danger of lifelong injuries. And they are usually the lowest-paid workers in the stadium.

Professional cheerleaders make on average $150 per game, or $22,500 a year, according to NBC. Classified as independent contractors, the cheer squad are not required to be paid by the NFL (or the NBA) in line with minimum wage laws. Yet the football players for whom they cheer make an average of $2.7 million per season, with sky-high salaries in the multi-millions for star quarterbacks and lower — yet still substantial — payments of rookies who are just starting out. Those rookies are still guaranteed to make a minimum wage of $480,000.

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare cheerleaders to the players who are, after all, the stars of the show — even if the cheer squad is likely to have trained for just as many hours as their football-playing counterparts. But even minor roles on the field — almost all taken by men — are paid more than cheerleaders. NFL mascots make $25,000 per season: $3,000 more, on average, than the cheer squad. And waterboys make more than double that amount, bringing in an average of $53,000 annually.

Little wonder, then, that since 2014 multiple professional cheerleaders have filed lawsuits against the NFL for wage theft and mistreatment. Some of those lawsuits were settled by the teams — the Oakland Raiders, for example, settled for $1.25 million — and others are still ongoing. But even after limited success, the playing field is hardly made level for the cheer squad involved. The Raiders doubled their cheerleaders’ pay after settling that 2014 lawsuit — to minimum wage, or $9 per hour for mandatory events.

In 2021, Lacy Thibodeaux-Fields, the former Raiderettes cheerleader who brought the class action lawsuit as the lead plaintiff on behalf of her squad, told CNN Sport, “If I would have known then what I know now, I would have never stepped foot in the NFL and I’d probably encourage other girls not to either.” And Sharon R. Vinick, the attorney who represented the women, told CNN she was shocked when she first saw the contract signed by her client, because “it had more illegal provisions than any contract that I’ve read in almost 30 years of practicing law.” Although the Raiderettes won their lawsuit and had minimum wage instated, Vinick said it was a sad victory: “It didn’t end up with cheerleaders really being paid their worth. It just ended up with them being paid minimum wage if they continued. Instead of arguing about whether these women should be paid minimum wages, we should talk about paying these women their fair worth for what they contribute to the game day experience.” Even the highest-paid cheerleaders in the NFL, the Carolina Panthers, are paid just $500 per game.

Carolina Panthers cheerleaders, pictured here before a pre-season game, are the highest paid in the NFL (Getty Images)

It’s not just the pay that makes it tough to be a cheerleader, though. The cheer squad is usually asked to adhere to strict protocols in terms of how they look, where they work outside of their cheering job, who they associate with, and even how they speak. The Cowboys is known to have some of the most rigorous standards out there, including making their cheerleaders sit a written test about American history, world affairs and obscure NFL rules. Passing is required to make it into the squad. Yet, in 2009, ESPN got a number of the Cowboys football players to take the test themselves — and they failed.

“While I don’t think we should make as much as the players, the girls are truly exploited. I mean, exploited, you know, like paid $20 a game,” says Olivia*, who was on the NBA’s Chicago Bulls’ professional cheerleading squad, the Luvabulls, from 1999 to 2000, and requested to use a pseudonym because of her continued work in the industry. “Working 40 hours a week, injuring your body, [getting] lifelong injuries, which I deal with now.”

Olivia went to tryouts to become a Luvabulls cheerleader, which involved competing against “hundreds and hundreds” of girls through multiple rounds over a weekend. Those who got through — “about 30 or 40” — then went on to a camp, where “you were watched and evaluated on your agility, how quickly you pick up [cheers] and your general attitude”. Once you made the squad, she says, there was a period of “Marine-style hazing”. The coaches and squad leader would repeatedly drill it into cheerleaders that they were here for “exposure, not the money” and believed in tearing people down in order to build them up again: “We were verbally abused, absolutely. And degraded and screamed at and it was a lot of shaming. Shame to control us.”

“It was like a sorority mean-girl culture,” Olivia adds. On her first day, she turned up to practice and accidentally made a grave error: “I went to the room and I just started stretching and put my things down, and I was screamed at, because that was not where a rookie would go. Rookie was supposed to be in the back of the room… You quickly learned your place and that was at the back. You never would’ve had the audacity to come to the front of the room, you were always behind a vet. So it was like a vet-rookie system.” Though she “kept her smile on” throughout practice, she left in tears.

How the girls looked while they were cheering was paramount. When they arrived on the squad, they were told: “You’re dyeing your hair this color, you’re wearing your hair like this… There was no rebuttal. This is your hair color now. This is what you have to do. You’re getting your hair done and you have to maintain it for the rest of the year. Because they had a specific amount of blondes, redheads, curly, straight.” The rules were so stringent that they even dictated nail length. Every practice, girls were expected to turn up with a full face of make-up: “foundation, blush, the bright red lipstick.” And on game days, “if anything happened during the game, like a run in our nylons or a chip in our nail polish, we were deducted pay.”

The low payments they received had already been whittled down by having to pay for their own parking at games and having hours taken out of their days doing compulsory volunteering work to keep up the squad’s good name. And the rules extended beyond nail polish and lipstick into their personal lives: no dating the basketball players — in fact, no speaking to the players at all, even if they turned up to watch the cheerleaders practice — no drinking, and no working in outside jobs that might impact on the squad’s reputation. Olivia says nightclub bottle service was specifically banned, but she worked in bottle service because it was one of the only jobs she could do that fit with her cheerleading practice hours. Girls scraped by financially, working all hours of the day and night to make ends meet.

The athletic work was equally hard. In 1999, the Luvabulls rehearsed in the basement of a hotel on a concrete floor in a room without mirrors. They had no access to physical therapy, nor coaches who warmed them up or helped them stretch after practice. The specific, repetitive movements they were expected to do — split-kicks, toe-touch jumps — were hard on their joints, particularly their hips. Olivia has a torn hip labrum now, which she knows she’ll have to have surgically corrected in the future. The difference in care that was shown to the Luvabulls versus the Bulls players was like night and day.

Working for an NFL or NBA team is a full-time job, and it usually comes with a salary that pays below the poverty line (Getty Images)

Members of the squad had to audition for every game: despite being on the cheerleading team, there was no guarantee you’d be sent out to cheer, and if you weren’t sent out then you didn’t make any money at all. By the time you auditioned, however, you’d have memorized “15 to 20 routines,” plus a standard “feature”. There was no set list for the games and no way to know which routine was coming up next when they went onto the field to cheer for the basketball players. Instead, “the only way you would know [which routine you had to do] was when you heard the music, which was really messed up because you can’t hear because it’s on the court and it’s vibrating. And you just had to follow. Someone had to know… I remember we had to memorize the wood panels on the floor, which is insane — there’s thousands and thousands.” If anyone brought up the unrealistic expectations, they were told, “There’s the door,” or asked, “Why are you even here?” (The Chicago Luvabulls were approached for comment but did not respond.)

Though Olivia says cheerleaders are taught never to say a bad word about cheering to the press — and multiple rebuffed efforts to reach cheerleaders who currently work for NFL and NBA teams seem to prove her point — there are some who have taken public action. Aside from the professional cheerleaders who brought lawsuits against the NFL, one young woman recently took her high school cheerleading case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Brandi Levy, a former member of the Mahanoy Area High School’s cheer squad in Pennsylvania, won a case in summer 2021 that stretched over four years. Levy had uploaded a Snapchat post in 2017 after she failed to make the varsity team that read: “f*** school, f*** softball, f*** cheer, f*** everything.” She says it’s the coach’s daughter who brought the post to the attention of the people in charge of the squad, and she was subsequently kicked off the team. Four years later, Supreme Court justices found that her First Amendment rights to freedom of speech had been violated by the school’s actions.

“One of my favorite things about cheer was building and flying,” says Levy in a Zoom interview, referring to the aerodynamic moves done by athletic cheerleading teams. “I was a flyer so I was one of the people they would put up. I kind of liked the rush.” Flyers are the lightweight cheerleaders who learn to lock one leg and stand solidly while being held by a member of the “base”. Learning to be a flyer comes with a lot of practice, a strong core and, inevitably, risk. Levy says the squad cheered for “our school’s football games, the boys’ basketball games and pep rallies, and sometimes wrestling”. They never cheered for girls’ sports.

A ‘flyer’ Kentucky cheerleader at a college football game (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Although a high school team is very different to a professional NFL or NBA squad, there were still stringent rules in place about appearance: nail polish and jewelry was banned, and hair had to be pulled back into a specific style. Every cheerleader had to wear black socks and matching shoes, and in the colder months, they had to wear warmup jackets over their uniforms that also had to be paid for out of pockets. The jackets were expensive, so they were encouraged to fundraise to cover the cost.

She remembers calling her father and telling him that she’d been ejected from the team, and says that she and her family then went to multiple school meetings to try and resolve the situation. The cheer coach, the superintendent, the school board and even the principal wouldn’t budge. She was banned from the team, and that was that.

Then one day, Brandi came home and there was a lawyer in the house. She felt it was acutely unfair that she’d been barred from her favorite sport for making one social media post while outside of school, but she had never imagined her case would go to court — never mind to the Supreme Court. “When I first heard it was going to go that far, I looked at my dad and I was like, Uh-uh. I was like, You’re lying to me,” she says. “Like, I wasn’t believing it whatsoever.”

Brandi Levy’s case was supported by the ACLU (ACLU handout)

While Brandi’s case made it through the courts, she continued to navigate the usual ups and downs of high school. It was a lot of pressure. Her classes were made more awkward by the fact that her cheer coach doubled up as her math teacher — but elsewhere, “there were other teachers who would pull me aside and say I’m doing the right thing,” she says. Surprisingly enough, Levy returned to her cheer squad the summer after she was kicked off, when it became clear that she would win her case, and continued for the rest of her time at Mahanoy. She says there was a strange atmosphere at first, and that she doesn’t retain any close friendships from the team, but she quickly got back into it because she loves the sport.

The Supreme Court judgment was handed down during the pandemic, meaning that Levy and her lawyer appeared video video-conferencing: “It was all these higher-up people and they’re all sitting there saying my name and I was like, these are people you would never expect to know about someone from such a small area.” And Brandi is proud that she made a national difference, though she says in some ways she wouldn’t do it all over again, because “it was very, very time-consuming” and “what 14-year-old wants to go through that?” Seeing the work her legal team did, she says, didn’t make her want to become a lawyer herself — instead, it did the complete opposite. She walked away thinking she would never want to get deeply involved with the legal system as a career. But on the wage discrepancy between professional cheerleaders and their football and basketball-playing counterparts, she’s clear: “They’re obligated to be there for exactly as long and take up just as much energy. Why are they getting paid so much less?”

In 2022, The Athletic reported that a football player had signed a NIL deal that would pay as much as $8 million by his third year of college. Still in high school at the time the contract was drawn up, he was due to be paid $350,000 immediately on signing. A NIL deal — a “name, image and likeness” deal — allows amateur athletes to get around rules which don’t technically allow them to be paid for what they do. Instead, they are able to profit from their name, image or likeness being used in advertising materials that might be generated by the school or team.

Although such loopholes have been allowed and embraced by the football machine, high school cheerleaders continue to be paid nothing at all for their efforts. For them, it’s still all about exposure. And while professional sportsmen in the NFL and NBA often get away with unsavory behavior — few will forget the multiple scandals of Kyrie Irving, which range from accusations of antisemitism to spreading anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories — professional cheerleaders associated with the same teams continue to have their lives inside and outside of work controlled by arcane rules. As Brandi Levy’s case shows, even amateur cheerleaders in high school are held to standards that professional football and basketball players in the NFL and NBA are not.

Held to higher standards and offered much less compensation than their male counterparts, cheerleaders are continually told, sometimes in very harsh words, that they are lucky to be there. But, according to Olivia, the dynamic inside many squads feels similar to an abusive relationship. Looking at the objective facts, it’s hard to agree that they aren’t, in fact, in an extremely unlucky position.

As the cheer squad gears up to entertain the crowd on Sunday, the fans would do well to consider what their lives look like when they’re not on the field. Though they will undoubtedly look glamorous — those rules on appearance are there for a reason — it is not a glamorous lifestyle. And though they might look like equals to the male counterparts they stand alongside while performing impressive athletic feats, it’s clear that, in the eyes of the NFL, they are anything but.