The Other Athletes on the Field
At the U of M, cheer and dance are serious sports.
Dan weaver, coach of the U of M’s 30-member cheerleading squad, says he has heard his team members dismissed as “not real athletes.”
“There is always a bit of that,” Weaver says. “You get the cheer stereotypes, like ‘You’re just a bunch of pretty girls shaking pom-poms.’ That’s not how we run things at Minnesota. We recruit the most talented athletes.”
Weaver’s cheerleading team is part of the University’s powerhouse Spirit Squad, which also includes the dance and pom team, the hockey cheer team, and the Goldy Gopher mascot team. Dance and pom are the hands-down Squad standouts, with 23 consecutive national championship titles under their (matching) belts: “Our dance team has been the most successful team the school has ever had,” Weaver says. “People think of Minnesota as a great hockey school. But really, we’re an even better dance school.”
Performing as Team USA, the U of M dance team took home gold (pom) and silver (jazz) medals at the International Cheer Union World Championships in late April. Minnesota was selected to represent the U.S. National Team in February, following its 23rd national championship since 2003—the most in the nation.
Next comes Goldy, with four national mascot championship wins. And in January 2025, Minnesota’s cheer team—at 126 years strong, the nation’s oldest cheer program—nabbed the top spot at the UCA & UDA College Cheerleading and Dance Team National Championship, placing the Spirit Squad firmly at the top of the “go team!” heap.
Despite all these wins, Weaver thinks one reason many people don’t appreciate the skill and strength required to be a member of the best cheer team in the nation is simply because they don’t think of cheer as a sport—in the traditional sense at least.
“It’s hard to understand us, because we are different and not as clearly defined,” he says. “We’re very unique in how our sport is run. The football team’s job is to win games. For cheer, winning games is a secondary goal to our primary goal, which is to support other teams—as well as being ambassadors for the University.” Because of Spirit’s non-competitive outer layer, the cheer and dance teams, whose members are considered varsity athletes, aren’t officially part of the NCAA.
“When you look at the NCAA’s definition of athletics,” Weaver says, “the primary focus needs to be on competition.” And though both cheer and dance compete—and win—at the national level, team members spend most of their time cheering on other athletes at games and official University events, Weaver explains. “Competition is not our primary focus. So we aren’t compared to other sports—even if our team members are some of the top athletes in the nation.”
Up, up and away
On a snowy evening last March, members of the cheer team gathered for practice at Maturi Pavilion on the West Bank. These athletes come in a range of sizes, from lithe women ready to be tossed into the air and land on top of human pyramids to large men with muscled legs who hold their partner’s feet in their hands and lift them into the air.
This night, as at most of their practices, team members separated into small groups, practicing pyramids, stunts, and throws, with Weaver and his assistant coaches spotting and calling out drills. It’s breathtaking as participants perform trick after trick; in the all-girl team, for instance, young women hoisted a flyer, usually the smallest member of the group, up over their heads, somehow turning her 360 degrees before tossing her into the air to flip and land solidly onto the ground.
With all these high-level pyramids and flips, cheer can be a dangerous sport, Weaver says: “It’s my job to make sure we’re approaching things safely. We always work from a progression standpoint. Our athletes have 30 skills they have to master before they can start to attempt elite skills.”
Tanner Rivard, now a fourth-year member of the team from Franklin, Wisconsin, is a tosser: a member who throws his teammates into the air and catches them before they fall. A former high school football player and wrestler, Rivard is the only member of the team who wasn’t recruited. A former girlfriend, herself a cheerleader, thought he’d be perfect for the sport, so before his first year at the University, he reached out to Weaver.
After some tryouts, Rivard was offered a prime spot. “It is so cool,” he says of the team. “It’s great being able to do stunts at this level.”
Cheer team participation is all-encompassing, Weaver says. It includes four required practices a week and three strength-training workouts during the main part of the season, and members of the team commit to cheering at some 50-60 events a year. While a smaller group of 12 athletes travel to away games, everyone cheers at home games, he says.
“We always do men’s and women’s basketball games, and then there are also campus appearances and University events,” Weaver says. “And we cheer at a few gymnastic meets to support them, too.”
The time commitment could prove too much for some, but Weaver says his team is famous for attracting—and keeping—athletes for their full University career. “I look for a team of like-minded people. The only athletes we bring on are those who we believe will fit into our culture and stick with it. I’m very strong on culture; I believe culture wins championships.”
One... national sensation
On the same March night at Bierman Athletic Complex, members of the dance team were sprawled across a gym floor, stretching before one of their regular practices. In leggings and snug exercise tops, the athletes looked like a modern-day cast of A Chorus Line, effortlessly doing backbends and splits and casually pulling their legs over their heads: The only difference is the jazzy soundtrack has been replaced with a modern beat.
The dance team members, 24 women and one man, look similar. The women’s long hair is all center-parted and slicked back, and hours and hours of practice mean they move together fluidly when Assistant Coach Tia Tumbleson gives an instruction and flips on the music. The University’s pom and dance team is an international sensation, thanks to viral videos of their winning performances on TikTok and YouTube.
high flyer
Watch an elite-level cheer routine, and there’s always that heart-stopping moment when a strong, tiny woman teeters at the top of a human pyramid before bravely launching herself to the ground.
On the U of M’s cheer team, more often than not over the past few years, that strong, tiny woman was Elinor Untiedt (B.S. ’25) from Stillwater, Minnesota (above left). Untiedt (pronounced “untied”) got involved in cheer back in elementary school, when she came home with a flyer about a local dance studio’s cheer class stuffed in her backpack. “My mom ended up taking me to the class, Untiedt recalls. “She was like, ‘Oh, boy. I don’t think this is going to work.’”
But it did work: Untiedt quickly realized she loved cheer. A small-boned 4-foot-10, Untiedt was a natural flyer, a cheer team member who is thrown into the air during stunts. “I’ve been a flyer my whole cheer career,” she said. “I’m not a very large person naturally, so I kind of fell into that role. I never had a huge growth spurt, and I’m not good at lifting people up. It made the most sense for me to fly.”
A few years from that first cheer class, Untiedt’s parents were driving her across the Twin Cities to cheerleading gym in Bloomington. “I practiced two nights a week,” she says. “I was on two teams. Four nights a week I’d go in extra for tumbling practice.”
In high school, Untiedt focused more on group stunts, but at the U, Weaver encouraged her to focus on coed and partner-stunt work. She especially enjoyed doing “hand-in-hand” work.
While there are many different variations to that work, Untiedt exceled at tricks where she “[did] a handstand in the base’s hands. There’s lot of ways to then flip back to your feet,” including flipping forward or backward.
Untiedt also enjoyed doing pyramid work—especially “two-and-a-halfs” where, she explains, “we have a girl on the ground and one standing on their shoulders,” and then someone threw Untiedt, known as a “tippy” in this maneuver, up on the tippy-top, where she landed in someone’s hands, completing the pyramid.
“There’s a lot of different variations of pyramids, and a lot of cool ways to get up and down and things to do while you are in the air,” she says. “Pyramids are not really common outside of college cheer.” —AS
Amanda Gaines (B.S.B. ’09), dance team coach, is the woman behind this juggernaut. She started dancing at age 3, focusing on ballet and tap. Gaines began competing at age 4 and continued through high school. She chose the U of M for college and was selected for the dance team her first year. In 2003, when Gaines was a sophomore, the team won its first national championship in the jazz category. Since then it’s been one win after another.
After graduation, it only made sense for Gaines to stay on at Minnesota dance—first as an assistant coach, a position she held for eight years. She then took a few years off before returning as head coach in spring 2020. While Gaines puts her heart and soul into her work leading the dance and pom teams, she also has another life outside of the University. Though her team is the winningest in the University’s history, being head coach isn’t a full-time job.
“My real full-time job is at Target’s corporate office,” Gaines says. “I’ve never coached for the money. It has always been for the relationships and the passion—and maybe that’s what makes us so successful.”
That personal commitment to the sport extends to the athletes, Gaines adds: “A lot of our athletes work jobs in addition to being full-time athletes for the University.” But they take their athletic commitment to the team seriously.
Like members of any team, the dance team must put in their time at the gym. “We work with a strength coach two to three times a week,” Gaines says, “then, during the school year, we practice three to four times a week in the evening, depending on what part of the season we’re in. We are elite athletes. It might surprise some people, but to get these two-minute routines pulled together is a lot of work.”
Beyond winning national competitions, dance and pom team members understand that they, like other members of the spirit squad, have an even greater responsibility. “Our goal is always to be strong representatives of the University,” Gaines says. “When we are on the sidelines and at community events, we know we are representing something larger than ourselves.”
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