Work at play
Philly dance teams demonstrate a uniform strategy of success

By Tara Nurin
Philly EDGE Correspondent

Put to bed your visions of the Carolina Panthers cheerleaders allegedly engaging in hot lesbian fests in bathroom stalls. You have almost no chance in hell of walking into this kind of mélange in Philadelphia. Not because you’re not cool enough to hang out in those bars or because you never did have that kind of luck, but because in Philadelphia, it’s simply not very likely to happen.
Professional cheerleaders and sideline dancers in Philadelphia are just not those kinds of girls. Sorry to disappoint those of you who are reading this article to pick up some juicy sex gossip about the ladies who posed in a lingerie calendar so racy that their Web site has an age-restriction disclaimer. Despite the titillating poses the Eagles cheerleaders struck to raise money for their travel expenses (see, they’re working girls), Philly-area cheerleaders and dancers are nice. And damn hardworking.
Christy McCall bounces into a Northeast Philly Bally’s fitness club with a broad smile and a sunny hello. The 21-year-old Philadelphia Kixx soccer-team dancer is ready for practice and feeling great, despite a full day working at a local mall, teaching children’s dance and taking her own classes toward an undergraduate degree at Temple.
For two hours on this winter Tuesday night, she’ll learn a new routine with her fellow Kixx dancers, then spend Wednesday night going over it at home because she’d better know it cold by practice Thursday. Her coach also expects her to practice a few hours every night on her own, work out hard enough to keep her sexy figure, make several community appearances each month and dance like nobody’s business every home game -- about once a week. Dancers who don’t cut it are off the team the following year.
For all of her effort, McCall earns $50 a game.
“It gets kind of stressful sometimes because I’m trying to go to school and I’m trying to work part-time and I don’t have a free night a week,” says the Langhorne native. “I get paid for it but I can’t survive off it. I wouldn’t be able to eat or have gas money … so you have to like to do it.”
Watching McCall and her teammates rehearse, you’d never know they have any real-life responsibilities outside this gym. They’re disarmingly and genuinely friendly to outsiders, and they’re giggling and chatting so much between dance moves that their coach – a Philadelphia 76ers dance team captain – keeps gently yelling, “Girls! Girls!” to get them to refocus.
Once they do, these 16 girls are on it. They’re in step, in rhythm, and damn, even in their workout clothes, they look good. But it makes sense. This is what they do, who they are. Most, if not all of them, are dancers from a young age, hoping to make it beyond the world of the Kixx Dance Team.
“I would love to dance for the Sixers, of course,” says 22-year-old Jenna Grace, of Perkasie. “They get paid for their practices; get paid for their promotional things. It’s a bigger scene… (But) this is a stepping stone. This is where I start.”
Grace dreams of opening a dance studio when she’s older and McCall thinks she may become a school psychologist who runs a studio on the side.
For now, both live with their parents to save money. They say none of the dancers party much, if at all, and they’re not allowed to even approach the players, much less engage in anything eyebrow-raising with them.
Several of the ladies can be overheard confessing, “We’re just the dance team.”
This is probably not the glamorous life fans imagine as they feast their eyes on these hot-bodied, gyrating young women.
“At a game you feel like a celebrity,” Grace says. “It’s a big deal. Everybody thinks you are amazing.”
But off the field, too many Philly pro-sports fans just don’t know or care about soccer, and the Kixx dancers find themselves constantly explaining their existence, mostly to men who either want to pick them up or put them down. For example, at a recent Eagles tailgate in The Linc parking lot, “This guy wouldn’t leave our table,” remembers Grace. “He was basically making fun of us. He kept saying, ‘What is soccer? What is the Kixx? You have a dance team? Why don’t you be an Eagles cheerleader?’ It kind of hurts a little bit but if you just come to a game you’ll understand.”
Eagles cheerleaders don’t deal with the same public identity issues as the Kixx dancers, because, well, they’re Eagles cheerleaders. They’re visible, they’re at the top of the hot Philly chick hierarchy, and they wear Vera Wang (a stroke of fashion luck made possible by the friendship between the famous designer and team owner Jeffrey Lurie’s wife).
But, like the Kixx dancers, they, too, have day jobs and often battle stereotypes.
“People assume this is all you do,” laments second-year cheerleader Lora Sheeran, a college graduate and full-time catering sales rep. “That is where the assumptions come in that you’re a typical cheerleader bimbo. And … the (lingerie) calendar is suggestive so they think other things.”
But 29-year-old cheerleader Kenyetta Sharpe says nothing could be further from the truth. The poised Camden beauty who also works as senior research technician with the Campbell’s Soup Company insists the buttoned-up Eagles organization would never tolerate any undignified behavior from its members.
“During the season, whether you’re in or out of uniform, you’re a Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader,” states Sharpe. “You set yourself up for this role, so you have to say, ‘When I go out in public, I can’t go hanging out in bars and drinking and smoking. If I used to be the wild girl, no more of that. I have to be civil because you never know who’s watching.’”
She adds that only the best and brightest will survive when 600 cheerleader hopefuls try out for 38 spots. What emerges is a group of beautiful, strong, bubbly women who could all easily compete for the Miss America crown.
“They’re looking for showmanship; they’re looking for someone they can put in front of the camera; they’re looking for someone they can send overseas to perform,” Sharpe says. “You always want to be professional and you have to move with grace and you want to speak well.”
“What people don’t know is that we do a lot of work in the community,” says 25-year-old Sonya Crutchfield, who put her master’s of public health degree to work last February, when she spent a month caring for AIDS orphans in Tanzania. “There are a lot of different aspects to us, so when they just see the lingerie calendar, that’s just a minute part of what we do.”
But the cheerleaders do sex it up in a lot of their promotional material, so it’s easy to see how testosterone-heavy football fans might get penalized for a few false starts.
“I went to one of the away-game parties and a guy came up to me and he was really excited and he wanted to shake my hand,” Crutchfield recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ so I went to shake his hand and he put a condom in my hand. That was the worst experience I’ve ever had.”
The tasteless behavior of some fans can be a drawback of the position.
The women practice together about eight hours a week, arrive to each home game four hours early to prep their hair and makeup and meet and greet fans, rehearse on their own almost every day, and attend at least two community appearances a month.
From Philadelphia cheerleaders must re-audition every year, they’re forced to smile and be polite regardless of their mood and they often have to endure bad weather for hours at a stretch.
Sure, there are perks: local celebrity status, close friendships with squad mates (women on both teams swear they all get along), trips to the Super Bowl, photo spreads in Maxim. But they say, above all, one aspect always reminds them why they do it.
“It’s the fans,” Sharpe says. “As soon as you hit the field and they’re like, ‘Now introducing the 2005/2006 Eagles cheerleaders,’ and you hear ‘AAAAHHH!!!’ and you’re like, ‘OK. It’s show time. It’s time to turn it on.’ And it never goes off.”
“When they see us they get so excited,” agrees Sheeran. “That’s when you know that’s what the job’s all about.”