Cheers get a pom-pom-free makeover
Ticat Performance Team including four men, 10 women replaces cheerleading squad
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats still have a team that cheers, but they are not a cheerleading team.
And, for the first time in nearly two decades, there are males on the team.
The city’s iconic professional football franchise has restructured and renamed the long-held method of stimulating fan engagement through all-female dancers, cheerleaders, somewhat-revealing costumes and flailing pom-poms.
At last Friday’s home pre-season game against Toronto, the team quietly unveiled the Ticat Performance Team — a 14-person unit which includes four men — which has replaced the Hamilton Tiger-Cats cheerleaders. Two of last year’s cheerleaders are part of the new group.
They are dressed in what Matt Afinec, the team’s executive vice-president of business operations, describes as “gym attire: running shoes and jogging pants. No pom-poms.”
He says that the team’s fan-prompting routines will involve a lot of motion and tumbling, and be more diversely athletic than in the past, although the Ticats’ cheer team, with their fast-paced dance routines, also had a high athletic component. Team mascots were with the Performance Team when they prompted the crowd from the end zone Friday night, and their routines were relayed to the crowd via the giant stadium scoreboard. But they’ll spend as much time, or more, working the crowd in the stadium stands and open spaces than from the field.
“The fan experience evolves and is fluid,” says Afinec. “‘Cheerleading’ implies a single connotation of choreographed on-field dances.
“The Performance Team still has an on-field dancing and performing function, but unlike in the past they’re spending more time with fan interaction. They’ll go up and greet kids at Stripes Jungle, they go to the social area at the Stipley patio. It’s more of a roving experience.”
That dovetails with the “360-degree” concept for Tim Hortons Field that the team has been promoting in the past couple of years, allowing and encouraging fans to socialize with others in the stadium who aren’t necessarily sitting near them; in open patio spaces, corridors and licensed gathering areas.
Afinec describes the Performance Team as “brand ambassadors” and says they’ll represent the franchise outside the stadium.
The restructuring can also be viewed through the social-consciousness prism. “Traditional” cheerleading as a general concept has long been accused of objectifying women and the Ticats are distancing themselves from that.
“We’re doing cheerleading differently,” Afinec agrees.
“These are now athletic performers wearing athletic clothing, it’s about celebrating mixed gender. This is an evolution. It’s consistent with the tone of social issues going on in 2018.”
But, he emphasizes, that’s not the main reason the club made the change. The Ticats always conduct a number of surveys of the season’s ticket subscribers and casual fans and found of late, Afinec says, “that traditional function of cheerleading scored near the bottom of what fans deemed optimal for the enjoyment of games.”
“It’s changed, we are seeing cheerleading evolve,” says Lesley Stewart, who coached the Ticat cheerleaders from 2005 until stepping down after last season to concentrate on a number of other projects, including her new show on TSN 1150.
All nine CFL franchises have cheerleading teams and have had them for decades. Some, like the Toronto Argonauts, are called cheerleaders and use pom-poms, while many are called “cheer teams” and all have a heavy dance-routine element as well as a sideline cheering function.
Most are all-female, but the Edmonton Eskimos, Saskatchewan Roughriders and Montreal Alouettes each have some men on their team. And Edmonton has both a cheer team and a “hype team,” which this year will dance to a new drum squad. Montreal added a “dance team” to its all-female cheer team this year, and seven of the new team’s16 members are male.