SRU coed cheerleading squad wins big at national competition
It took a few practices for the Slippery Rock University cheerleaders to prepare routines to entertain an audience for an entire football game. The routine the squad performed at the National Cheerleaders Association was two minutes and 15 seconds long — one the team worked on since the beginning of the fall semester.
That half-year of work paid off, however, because all that preparation helped the SRU coed cheerleading squad bring home the National Cheerleaders Association College Nationals championship. The competition was April 9 to 13 at Daytona Beach, Fla., and was attended by thousands of cheerleaders from around the country.
Josh Pugliese, coach of the SRU squad, said this is the first year the coed team has won the championship. It took fourth place in 2024.
Pugliese said cheerleading teams perform twice at the association’s College Nationals — once to get their “raw scores,” and a second time to get their final scores. SRU’s team got a raw score of 84.6 out of a possible 90 on its first day, then earned a 84.57 on its second day, which Pugliese credits to the team’s precision in its choreographed routine.
“We got a lot of comments on the opening that it is very dynamic,” Pugliese said. “We got comments on the dance section that the motions were tight and sharp and enjoyable to watch.”
The university’s coed team has about 45 members, plus the school mascot, Rocky, who did not compete with the team at nationals.
The team from SRU took a bus to Florida on April 8, competed that Thursday and Friday before getting the final results while still in Florida at the competition.
“Competitive cheerleading is the only sport where it's putting on a show — you have to perform and compete,” Pugliese said. “When you cheer, you have your routine, and you get scored on difficulty, execution. We have coed stunting, elite, pyramids, jumps and tumbling and then you end with a dance section.”
Competition week is a flurry of activity, according to Sophia Wogan, junior captain for the SRU coed cheerleading squad, but the performance time itself is feels like a lifetime in two minutes and 15 seconds.
Even though the routine is much shorter than the team’s usual performances, she said team members have to prepare mentally and physically for the competition.
“At a game, it doesn't take much mental capacity, even though it's for like two hours,” Wogan said. “In the (competition), you don't have any other choice. Push as hard as you can for two minutes — after that you can breathe heavily.”
Wogan said after football season is when the cheerleading squad really buckles down to prepare for the National Cheerleaders Association final. As junior captain, Wogan acts as a communicator between the team members and the coaches and vice versa. The team’s other captains this year are Laj Sitton, senior captain, and Landon Beachly, another junior captain.
Once the choreography is nailed down, the team will sometimes run the routine multiple times per day in the lead up to the competition.
“We normally get our routine in December, then we start running full-out in spring — nine full-out a day,” Wogan said. “It takes over your whole life.”
The routine is set to music, but not recognizable songs, because the team can’t use copyrighted music in its performance, Wogan explained. Pugliese said that for competition, the team comes up with a routine that uses every cheerleader and every category of stunt available to a full squad.
“The routine that we do, it's on a full mat,” Pugliese said. “There's tumbling, jumps, pyramids, jumps, tosses. We do sideline cheer at games. We do stunts at games but it's not the same as the routine.”
For the squad this year, Wogan is a coed flier, an elite flier, a basket toss flier and is positioned mid-level on the pyramid, meaning she is on top of cheerleaders, but someone is also on top of her. Wogan explained that in her flier positions, other cheerleaders just throw her as high as they can so she can do tricks midair.
“The first time is always a little bit nerve-wracking,” Wogan said. “I envision myself doing it. Then it’s trust and muscle memory.”
There are thousands of cheerleaders in Daytona during the national finals, Pugliese said. For the competition, cheerleading squads perform in preliminary rounds, and then they compete in reverse order in the finals to get their final scores.
The SRU squad performed first in the preliminary round, and then performed as the last squad in the finals round.
Pugliese commented that scoring for cheerleading routines is difficult to get a grasp on, but there are several judges who rate a performance based on the different categories of tricks that make up a routine.
“There's typically six or eight judges, and there's normally a judge just for building, then a judge for tumbling, a judge for effect, another judge for baskets and jumps, a deduction and legality judge,” Pugliese said. “They put all the skills and comment on everything.”
The SRU team not only brought a good finale to the Daytona competition, Pugliese said the school’s win has been a long time coming for the university and himself.
“It's cool that we finally won because I cheered when I competed, and all-girl won,” Pugliese said. “My freshman year was 2010, and coed got second that year. I took over in 2016, we have been in top five since. Last year both teams got fourth.
“I was really happy to bring the championship back to (SRU).”
Wogan said there isn’t much time before the team gets back together to start preparing for next year’s competitions.
“That was two weeks ago, then we had last week off, and this week the first week of practices for next season,” Wogan said. “We're starting now for next year's Daytona; getting different elements of the routine. It does take a lot of work everyone had to commit to it fully.”
