By Benito Vila
It’s been a long time since as many as twenty girls have come out for the Pierson cheerleading squad. It’s been 40 years since any boys have offered to join the girls and give their cheers some lift.
All that’s changed this year.
Nineteen high school girls are on the team this winter, coach Robin Florence having to go through years of uniform to find something for everyone. Also on the team are two boys, Kyle McGowin and Christian Gonzales, seniors that play other varsity sports at Pierson.
When asked why he had come out for the team at practice on Monday, Gonzales replied, “We didn’t have anything else to do and the girls needed help. They said that we could make them a better team.”
Having this unexpected addition to the team has created more possibilities in the routines and stunts. Coach Florence is not expecting the boys to dance, but instead envisions that they’ll “step out and come out to support” what’s being done on the floor.
She has the boys working with specific units in order to hone their timing and tosses. In Monday’s practice, McGowin, whose mother, Stacy, is the Ross School cheerleading coach, had the bulk of the work, several of Gonzales’ new teammates out for one reason or another.
The girls attended a three-hour “stunt clinic” Saturday in Ronkonkoma and were eager to try their new maneuvers, McGowin taking direction from seemingly everywhere at once. Some of the moves came off clumsy but much of that was from the girls having worked on them before and McGowin trying to master balance and timing on the fly.
After each hesitation and misstep, there was genuine laughter, boys and girls both, out of breath, determined to make things work. After a while though, the counts and the catches became more rhythmic and the drops less frequent.
Echoing every coach in any sport, Coach Florence said, “The way you get it is doing it over and over again. Sometimes you have to move people to get the best combination and these kids will get there.”
It’s Showtime
The team will make its cheering debut Tuesday on Shelter Island, when the varsity Whalers take the floor against the Indians before their 5:45 p.m. tip-off. Coach Florence is looking to have some stunts and cheers ready for that game and for the Whalers home opener next Friday, but does not expect to see the halftime routine set until after the school holiday.
On the team, besides the two boys, are eleven first-year cheerleaders and eight returnees. Leading the squad is senior captain, Aura Skerys, a four-year “cheerer”. The other seven returnees are sophomores Amy Florence, Kylie Morrissey, Maddie Puckett, Laura Rinaldi and Skylar Willingham and junior Jenny Carlozzi.
Coming out for the first time are seniors Aly Bori, Christy Deery, Kyla Kudlak and Chloe Laundrie. Among the other “first-timers” are juniors Jillian Reiner, Leanna Koons, Shannon O’Malley and Sophie Thorner. Joining them are freshman Sophie Gianis and sophomores Hannah Potter and Guilia Mascali.
When asked what she’s liked the most about cheerleading thus far, Bori answered, “doing the stunting, throwing people and what not.” A captain of the Lady Whaler field hockey team, Bori added, “It’s a lot more relaxed and everyone’s having fun.” Gonzales shared that sentiment in comparing his new team to the Whaler soccer team, noting, “We don’t have to run everyday.”
Kudlak, an avid horse rider, suggested her classmates came out “because we’ve always had a lot of school spirit and we thought it’d be fun for senior year.” She likes having her male classmates there knowing “they’ll be a big help with the throws and lifts. Their strength is an asset. We’ll be able to do a lot more than most teams do.”
Yesteryears’ Whalers
McGowin and Gonzales are not the first boys to don scarlet and black as cheerleaders. In the winter of 1965-66, Kenny Cosgrove and John Fabiano broke new ground joining that season’s squad as the Whaler boys earned a league title on the court.
The next basketball season, Joe Pino and Brad Beyer came out to cheer, the pair helping Pierson take the county cheerleading title. That “win” earned the entire team a trip into Manhattan and an afternoon at Shea Stadium in the spring of 1967.
“[Pierson physical education instructor and cheerleading coach] Ellen Campbell was the one who got us to come out,” said Beyer last week. “She asked if it wouldn’t be great if we could make this squad something special.”
“I saw it as an opportunity to do gymnast things that I always liked doing anyway.”
Pino, meanwhile, remembered, “Basketball was king at Pierson and everyone was involved with pep rallies and pep squad. We all knew the cheers.”
Pino said when he was having trouble doing hand springs, he got training from Beyer, who took him down to the beach to practice. “We worked hard but our main goal was to have fun and we did a lot of that.”
In the late fall of 1967, Ray Simek, a newcomer to Pierson found Beyer bringing him into something he never dreamed of doing. Simek had been at a boys’ school for his first three years of high school and saw the team as “a great way to meet girls.”
He also remembered being “the only male cheerleaders in Suffolk County. We had trouble sometimes at other school, people razzing us but we had a lot of fan support.”
On one trip to Greenport, Simek and Beyer found themselves somewhat nervously cornered in a hallway with a couple of Porter fans, when, as Beyer tells it, Whalers Bobby Vacca and Phil Carney came upon the scene and asked, “‘Is everything OK here?’ And suddenly it was.”
Vacca this week recalled Beyer, Pino and Simek as being “as athletic as the players. They could have played with us but the only reason they joined up there was because the girls were so pretty.”
Fond Moments
The tales of those Pierson years would not be complete without the mention of the Whaler teams that won league titles every season from 1964 to 1968. In their interviews, Beyer, Pino and Simek rattled off the names of dozens of life-long friends and described a Pierson with 30-some kids per class.
“It was another time,” said Beyer, with Pino elaborating on that thought later from Ohio, by adding, “We were together all the time. We helped each other out in and out of school, thinking nothing of dropping what we were doing whenever someone needed a hand.”
The “trouble” the boys managed to get into was little different than what might bring on suspensions or discipline today, but often the outcome was not quite so dire. In one instance, Beyer and Simek snuck into the girls’ locker room and hid in the showers.
“We would have gotten in trouble but our giggling gave us away,” said Simek. “We were better off getting caught then because of our giggling than anything that might have happened later.”
Pino, who was part of yet another Pierson cheerleading title team in 1968-69 with Mark Weidert, still recalls the precision stomps, cow jumps and stunts that made people cheer. Dennis Case, current coach of the Lady Whaler basketball team and then a student at Hampton Bays High School, said, “The Pierson cheerleaders were the best on Long Island. Sag Harbor was really known for that.”
And Pino, Beyer, Simek and their teammates–Leslie Meinertzhagen, Marjorie Ruppel, Elaine McAree, Georgiana Fick, Jane Harris, Laura Reidy and Charlotte Yerkowitz–might hope that never changes.
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