The Sheila Variations

Back by popular demand ... the Phys. Wrecks!!

... or if not by "popular demand" but because I just, randomly, heard from Anne - an old friend from high school, a good good friend once upon a time ... and whaddya know, she Googled something, came upon my blog, and emailed me. I love my life sometimes.

When I was a senior in high school, the girls basketball team (many of the players were good friends of mine) started kicking some SERIOUS ASS. There were sisters on the team - unbelievable girls and unbelievable athletes - and they became Rhode Island stars for a couple seasons. They both were toweringly tall, and incredible on the court. They were referred to as "the twin towers".

I went to a big sports school. A typical public school. We had massive pep rallies for the football team, we had a fierce and ugly rivalry with the team from the neighboring town ... our school was pretty much all about football. (Although the guys who played on our soccer team were pretty much universally lusted after by the girl population in our school. There was always something cool and kind of hot about soccer players. Even before Posh & Becks, thank you very much.) Our boy's basketball team also got a lot of attention ... the games were always packed.

But girls sports? Not so much. Nobody gave a shit about girls sports. There were no pep rallies for the girls basketball team - even though they were, during my senior year, the most successful sports team in our school. (If you really think how obvious and blatant that bias is, it's really shocking. Unbelievable.) Our girls team were going to go to the state championships, probably. And yet ... no glory. The school didn't get behind them - at least not in the way the school typically did for football.

Our champions were having a great season - pretty much unnoticed by the school at large.

And of course - the football team and the boys basketball team had their own cheerleading squads. Teams of girls chosen SPECIFICALLY to cheer on the boys. Fair enough. Tradition and all that.

What I love about this story is that we (my friends) recognized the injustice in the situation - but we didn't write letters to The Rebellion (the school newspaper) - bemoaning the lack of support for girls. We didn't write letters to the Principal, pointing out the sexism in the fact that BOYS teams got pep rallies before a big game ... but GIRLS teams did not. No. We didn't use those normal attention-getting tactics. We did not attack. We didn't ask anyone in authority to fix the situation.

But mark my words. We were pissed.

So what did we do? We took the situation into our own hands. We formed a cheerleading squad. For the girls basketball team.

We didn't clear it with anyone. We didn't ask permission. We just did it.

My friend Anne was the main organizer and the brains behind the idea. Now please understand: None of us were cheerleaders. At least not by trade. We were not gymnasts. We were not dancers. We were not girlie-girls. We did not KNOW ANY CHEERS.

So we conceived of ourselves as: a kind of dark goofy version of a cheerleader. We had passion for our team, we didn't snark about THAT ... but the entire thing, our routines (that we made up) - was about making fun (subtle fun - not mean fun) of the instituion of cheerleading, in general. The institution of cheering for the boys. And how odd it was (and how ODD that it was ODD) to have GIRLS cheering for GIRLS.

But we took ourselves seriously. We had cheerleader practice. We made up cheers. We made fun of regular cheerleader cheers - making up our own versions. We did messy somersaults, but then leapt to our feet, and took a cheerleader pose to finish off the cheer. We were snarky. We were comedic. We imitated regular cheerleaders, but because we so obviously were not real cheerleaders - people would howl with laughter when they saw us. Sometimes that laughter would be mean. More often than not, though - people got the joke, and got into the spirit of what we were trying to do.

We did not give a shit what we looked like. We gloried in our own goofiness.

Our uniform was:

1. Grey sweatshirts
2. Men's boxer shorts
3. Hi-top sneakers

And our name?

The Phys. Wrecks.

Within a couple of weeks of us cheering at the girls games (and I'm not kidding about this - this is one of the accomplishments that I'm proudest of in high school) - the crowds started to grow, at the girls basketball games. We had pumped people up. We did goofy cheers in the cafeteria during school lunches - we manufactured a pep rally since the school wouldn't have an official one - and got people to come to the game. Soon - the bleachers were full to overflow at every game.

And one of our greatest triumphs was that the boys from other sports teams - football players, basketball players, soccer players ... started coming to the girls games. They started to take an interest. They came en masse - huge groups of rowdy jock high school boys - to scream like maniacs for the girls from their school. Unprecedented.

God. That was a proud moment.

And we did it without hectoring the administration, or scolding the boys. We just pumped up the enthusiasm and let people know: Our girls are rocking the house this year!!

I loved, too, how much the boys sports teams LOVED US. They had their own cheerleader squads. They had girls cheering specifically for them, in little flaired skirts, and saddle shoes, and letter sweaters. But they seemed relatively indifferent to them. Oh, they dated them ... probably slept with many of them too .. but with us it was different. They LOVED us.

It was extraordinary ... those guys just LOVED us. After each cheer, they would all hold up numbers to us - as though they were Olympic judges. (The image of them MAKING those flash cards with all the different numbers is truly heart-cracking). We'd finish some goofball cheer, where we did a fake pyramid, or we would all do somersaults in a row - you could hear the waves of laughter erupting across the gym - and we'd finish our cheer - and glance up in the stands at all the jock boys to see what score they would give us.

It was such camaraderie. Such good-natured comedy.

That was what the Phys. Wrecks made possible. In a weird way, the Phys. Wrecks brought the school together. Because the girls teams are, after all, PART of the school. And we forced everybody to deal with that - but we did it in a way that was enthusiastic, comedic, and inclusive.

It was a blast - one of my great high school moments.

Photos below.

Here is our "pyramid" for the yearbook photo. I ruined the symmetry with my mis-placed arms. But that was all part of the Phys. Wrecks charm, I suppose.

We showed great versatility:

We cheered!

We clapped!

We rabble-roused!

We did stunts that took people's breath away - just in terms of the sheer virtuosity and courageous gymnastic skill we displayed.

We DEMANDED loyalty from the school.

Come on, people, cheer for your team ...

Ohhhh, come ON!!!

We also were not above manipulation. We PLEADED with the school to support their own team.

Please, sir, I want some ...

more???

And ... of course ... When our team won ... as they so often did ...

There really was no other appropriate way for me to express myself than this pose (which, I have to say, in all modesty - I executed with perfection):

Gooooooo, team!!

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