Cheerleaders in China: Exporting spirit

UD cheerleaders in action in China (from left) are Jenny Haight and Matt O'Neill, Kayte Philson and Greg Gilbert and Meredith Sullivan and Seth Riblett.

12:13 p.m., Aug. 9, 2004--It was Wednesday, June 2, when UD cheerleading team coach Joe Mackley, his wife, Amy, and Jenny Haight, Meredith Sullivan, Kayte Philson, Matt O’Neil, Seth Ribblet and Greg Gilbert boarded a flight for Wuhan, China. Their mission—to bring spirit to Asia.

“It was the experience of a lifetime,” Mackley said. “They wanted us to initiate a national training program for cheerleaders.”

Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, is one of the largest cities in central China on the Yangtze River. The Wuhan Institute of Physical Education (WIPE) invited Mackley and his squad to China to teach its students how to inspire sports fans to cheer for their teams.

While Chinese sports teams have dancers at games, they don’t have anything that resembles American cheerleaders or spirit squads encouraging crowds to display emotional verbal support. “The most foreign concept to them was to actually shout for their teams,” Mackley said.

The adventure began two years before the trip when a delegation from WIPE, visiting UD’s health and exercise sciences program to discuss creating an exchange program, saw a video of UD’s cheerleaders in action. They spoke to Mackley, who guided them through a practice session. When the delegation returned in February 2002, they observed a cheerleading clinic at which the UD squad trained high school students and attended a UD basketball game.

Shortly after that visit, Mackley and a group of cheerleaders received permission to conduct a two-week clinic at WIPE. The institute paid for their accommodations in Wuhan, and UD supplied the airline tickets.

Mackley and UD’s squad worked with 10 men and eight women, teaching them co-ed stunts, basket tosses, pyramids and how to cheer. They worked for six hours a day for two weeks, then, it was the squad’s turn to see China.

They set out for Beijing where they explored the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and the controversial Three Gorges Dam Project during a three-day boat trip on the Yangtze.

But, Mackley said, the experience they will never forget was the time they spent in Wuhan living as the people who inhabit the area do. “We were embedded in the culture,” he said.

For Sullivan, who had never traveled outside the U.S. before, it was a life-altering experience. “Being able to immerse myself in another culture was something I never thought I’d experience. It amazes me that I traveled halfway around the world and experienced another way of life. It made me grateful for what I have here.”

Even though she was overwhelmed and apprehensive when she got off the plane in Wuhan, Sullivan can now count to 10 in Chinese, has a vocabulary of 20 Chinese words and a basic understanding of what it means to be Chinese.

The institute supplied Mackley and his wife, the three women and three men with apartments. Plumbing is at a premium, Mackley said. “The only access we had to a Western-style bathroom was in our apartments. The food is very plain: a lot of rice, turtle, fish and fish eyeballs, bullfrog and for meat—donkey.”

Mackley said their hosts had to know where they were at all times, and that they were never able to go anywhere spontaneously.

Sullivan and Philson were surprised at the way the Chinese view gender. “They value males more than females,” Sullivan said. “The girls would help the boys up and apologize to them when the boys got hurt or fell during lifts,” she said.

Philson noticed that the women were not allowed to smoke and always deferred to men. She said that people on the street ignored strangers, but their hosts were extremely welcoming and friendly to them.

“They put on a show for us with dancers and sports exhibitions. The students were eager to work with us,” Philson said. "We were treated very well. It was a wonderful experience that taught me a lot about Chinese culture and to appreciate America.”

The workshop was to have ended with Mackley selecting a group of WIPE students to train at UD for a semester, but he said they weren’t ready. The Chinese students will practice what they’ve learned from the UD cheerleaders, and, when a squad is ready, they plan to send a few athletes to UD for a semester to train with Mackley and his cheerleaders. Then, a UD delegation may return to Wuhan to help advance the program designed to spread sports spirit throughout China.

Article by Barbara Garrison

E-mail this article

To learn how to subscribe to UDaily, click here.