Back By Popular Demand: The Phys. Wrecks!

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 athletes – and they became Rhode Island stars for a couple of seasons. They were referred to as “the twin towers”.

I went to a big sports 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 all about football, although the basketball teams and soccer teams were also hot tickets.

But girls sports? Not so much. There were no school-wide 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.) Our girls team was going 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 girl champions were having a great season, unnoticed by the school at large.

What I love about this story is that my friends and I recognized the injustice in the situation, but we didn’t write letters to the school newspaper bemoaning the lack of support for girls. We didn’t write letters to the Principal, pointing out how unfair it was that BOYS teams got pep rallies before a big game, but GIRLS teams did not, and demanding he rectify the situation. We did not ask anyone in authority to fix the situation. It didn’t even occur to us to do so. It was all very riot grrrl, come to think of it, even though this was pre-riot-grrrl. If the problem is with the system, then don’t ask the system to adjust itself. Make your own system. Don’t ask for a seat at the table. Walk in and sit the fuck DOWN.

We seethed for a month or so about the injustice, because we wanted everyone to be as excited about the girls’ basketball team as we were. Finally, we had had it. It was time for drastic measures.

We formed a cheerleading squad for the girls basketball team. We didn’t clear it with anyone. We didn’t ask permission. We just went ahead and did it.

My friend Anne was the brains behind the idea. Now please understand: None of us were cheerleaders. We were not gymnasts or dancers. We did not KNOW ANY CHEERS.

We conceived of ourselves as a dark goofy version of a cheerleader. Enthusiastic, extroverted, thrilled for our team, like all good cheerleaders, but we would be our own thing. We didn’t talk about gender, but we knew that what we were doing was poking fun at unexamined gender rules, and so we ran with it. Our routines (there should probably be quotation marks around the word “routines”) were about making fun (subtle fun – not mean fun) of the instituion of cheerleading, in general, but more importantly, our routines would mostly be making a point: through our mere presence on the basketball court as cheerleaders, we wanted people to question their preconceived notions, and maybe think twice about the absurdity of the situation. Why is it “weird” for girls to be cheerleaders for girls? We forced people to confront WHY it seemed “odd.” Just by showing up.

This was not about lampooning sports, obviously, or making fun of those who love sports. We all loved sports. A couple of us were also star athletes (not me, just FYI), in track and field and soccer. We took our pursuit seriously. We had cheerleading practice. We made up our own versions of traditional cheerleader-cheers. We had no valid skills. We did messy somersaults, but then we leapt to our feet, and took a cheerleader pose to finish off the “cheer”. Some of our cheers involved things like “wheelbarrows” or random jumps with legs splayed out. Because we so obviously were not real cheerleaders, and we weren’t even trying to be like real cheerleaders, people would howl with laughter when they saw us. Sometimes that laughter would be mean. People don’t like to be confronted with their own prejudices, and that’s what we did. Yes, we were funny, but we were in on the joke. And we also loved our team. Again, our subtext was: “We want you to ask yourselves why it’s FUNNY to you and WEIRD that a girls’ team has girl cheerleaders. But after you ask yourself these questions, CHEER as loud as you can. Focus on what’s REALLY important.” We took our act on the road, traveling with the team to games at other schools, who didn’t know what hit them when we jogged out onto the court. Some people were seriously pissed off at us. They thought we were making fun of them. Which of course we weren’t. They were right up against the weirdness of the cheerleading-institution, if they would just look a little bit deeper. More often than not, though, people got the joke, and got into the spirit of what we were trying to do.

Our attitude influenced our uniform. Since our very presence as cheerleaders for girls brought up all these weird vibes of “what the hell are gender norms anyway and why do we think it’s weird that there’s a cheerleading team for a girls’ team” … we wanted our uniform to be boy-boy-boy-coded all the way.

We wore:

1. Baggy grey sweatshirts
2. Men’s boxer shorts
3. Hi-top sneakers

And our name?

The Phys. Wrecks.

Which was … accurate, if you saw our somersaults.

Within a couple of weeks of us cheering, the crowds at games started to grow. This is the high school accomplishment of which I am most proud. We had pumped people up! We had raised awareness of their winning streak! People didn’t want to miss out. We did cheers in the cafeteria during school lunches (we cleared this with no one, we just got up and commandeered the space), we threw an impromptu pep rally since the school wasn’t hosting an official one and we got people to come to the game. Soon – the bleachers were full to overflow at every game.

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 took an interest. They came en masse – huge groups of rowdy jock high school boys – screaming like maniacs for the girls from their school. Unprecedented!

We did all of this without scolding the boys. Or scolding anyone, really. I don’t know too many people who respond well to scolding. We wanted people to change their behavior, sure, but more than that, we wanted them to change their ATTITUDE, and scolding just makes people resentful. We wanted nothing less than a shift in consciousness! We didn’t DISCUSS all of this, we just sort of landed on the right approach by instinct. There may have been a “scold” implicit in what we were doing, a kind of “okay, fine, nobody’s doing the right thing here, but WE are, so follow our lead” but we kept our energy enthusiastic and excited. The focus was on the team’s accomplishments.

It was hilarious, too, and unexpected how much the boys sports teams LOVED US. (I feel like they were almost jealous that we weren’t THEIR cheerleaders. Cheerleaders are kind of taken for granted, they’re ubiquitous. But not us. When we ran out onto the court, all hell broke loose, because of the novelty of it, and also maybe – in looking back – because we were “rebels” – our school mascot, by the way – we were the ultimate representation of our particular school’s spirit. And there’s something freeing about people who don’t give a shit, who buck norms, who are like “Yes, I will run around wearing men’s underwear at away-games and I do not feel embarrassed.” This kind of thing made people excited: it was catching. And so the vibe at these games was MORE excited than the vibe for the boys’ games.) The boys seemed relatively indifferent to “their” cheerleaders. “Their” cheerleaders were supposed to be there, “their” cheerleaders were a given. With us it was different. The boys LOVED us. This is one of those unintended consequences you can’t plan for. It never occurred to us that the boy-jocks would love us like they did. That they would get SO INTO what we were doing, totally understanding the spirit of it. (We had friends who were also legit cheerleaders, who had – understandably – not-so-thrilled reactions to the reality of our “squad”. One said to us, “I understand what you’re doing. It still makes me feel a little bit bad. I get it. But still …” We understood and we appreciated her honesty. We were all in the Drama Club together. There was a basis of friendship there. But progress won’t be stopped. We gotta move forward, sister. (Also, not for nothin’, but we are basically STEALING all of your cheers – which you – as a gymnast – worked hard on and perform amazingly well. And you can ACTUALLY do a split. And a cartwheel. Hats off.)

After each one of our cheers, the rows of jock-boys sitting together in the bleachers would all hold up huge flashcards with numbers on them, as though they were Olympic judges. (The image of them MAKING those flash cards 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 gave us. If it was a bad score, we’d shout at them, “OH COME ON”, and they’d razz us, “IS THAT THE BEST YOU GOT?”

It created such camaraderie.

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, and we did it in a way that was enthusiastic, comedic, and inclusive.

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

We did stunts that took people’s breath away because of the sheer virtuosity and courageous gymnastic skill we displayed.

We clapped and cheered and rabble-roused.

And … of course … When our team won … as they so often did that spectacular year…

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):