Hip, Hip, Hooray : Los Alamitos High Cheerleaders Bring Home a National Title

Athlete Lance LeCompte, 17, said his father was thrilled when he and his 15 Los Alamitos High School teammates won a national title. “It didn’t make a difference to him that it was a cheerleading contest,” said LeCompte, whose father once played football. “He’s always encouraged me to do what I wanted,” said the straight-A junior who plays water polo in addition to cheerleading. He also plans to try out for the school wrestling team.

“The eight guys and eight girls on the cheerleading squad are all athletes,” said Judy Trujillo, the cheerleader squad adviser, who contends that cheerleading in high schools and colleges have changed from its traditional rah-rah role. “It’s a sport now.”

Trujillo said that winning the 1985 National High School Cheerleaders Championship held earlier this month in Orlando, Fla., against 37 finalists “was no accident, although our squad wasn’t favored to win. The team worked very hard all year to perfect their three-minute routine and that won it for them.”

At nearby Cal State Long Beach, which offers some scholarships to cheerleaders, Associate Athletic Director Bill Vendl said, “We’re recruiting cheerleaders . . . and Los Alamitos supplies us with three to five each year for the 24 positions we have available. They have a quality program and the best choreographer in the country.”

The choreographer, Rey Lozano, also happens to orchestrate the Long Beach cheerleading program in addition to running a series of cheerleading summer camps attended by Los Alamitos and Long Beach cheerleaders, who pay $100 each.

“Cheerleading today is a highly developed art form,” said Lozano, a former ballet dancer who has a developed a daily two-hour work session for the Los Alamitos cheerleaders that includes weight-lifting, dance and gymnastics. “Our training is tougher than some sports programs, so the cheerleaders have to be in shape to stand the grind.”

Although still in transition from the pom-pon and song days, “cheerleaders now want to be competitors, too,” noted Trujillo, “and they want to compete against other schools, just like the sports teams.”

And that, said senior Lisa Lander, 17, co-leader of the cheerleaders’ squad, “makes all of our practice and effort worthwhile. We work very hard and get a good experience from what we do, and competing against others is what we’re after.”

Trujillo says that schools will always have drill teams, bands and song leaders to draw crowd support and cheers and add color at athletic events, “but cheerleaders want more than that today and are willing to work very hard to get it.”

It took years to develop the current cheerleader squad, made up mostly of members who started on the freshman squad, advanced to junior varsity and worked their way to the varsity unit, a progression traditionally followed by baseball, basketball and football athletes.

“Now we have tryouts each year like the sports team,” said Trujillo, “and we get more than three times the number we need. It’s even easier getting the guys to join the team.”

In years past, “a lot of the guys would tell us they fought with their parents over becoming a cheerleader, but now the sport is getting more respect from the parents and their classmates,” she said. “Besides telling them about the overwhelming ratio of girls to boys on the squad, we point out that the school doesn’t have any other national team champion on campus.”