Winnipeg Blue Bombers win Grey Cup!

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers have won the 107^th Grey Cup! On November 24^th 2019, the team ended a twenty-nine year drought. Some lost faith, some lost hair. In the end the Blue Bombers stepped it up, with Winnipegger Andrew Harris being named the game’s MVP and the Most Valuable Canadian – a first in the history of the Grey Cup.

Go Bombers!

I could not be more proud of our football team. We’ve struggled, we’ve fought our way back to CFL domination and finally, it has ended in victory! Our Grey Cup parade will be the biggest parade in approximately twenty-nine years. No parade will compare to our parade. In keeping with the celebrations and stories of our home team, I’ve decided to share a very special and historical dialogue about my time as the Winnipeg Blue Bomber Cheerleading coach.

Coaching the Blue Bomber Cheer team

I have coached for a long time. Gymnastics, cheerleading and yoga; somehow I consider myself a yoga coach although I’m not entirely sure that is a thing because I rarely yell at the yogis. Downward dog! I was, however, a real and true cheerleading coach. With lots of yelling and all the coffee. The real deal.

My good friend Carrie and I had been coaching the University of Manitoba Bison Cheerleading team for many years. We took them to Nationals in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico as well as traveled for various competitions all over Canada. We also took them to Las Vegas, although we’ve never spoken of it again and I do not recommend it. We loved them and I like to tell myself that the feeling was mutual.

I can’t say that I was a warm blanket of comfort as a coach, but I did get shit done and I got it done well. Same with Carrie. No warm blanket needed. Because of my anti-blanket attitude (along with Carrie’s “light” version of that same attitude) the Manitoba Bison Cheer team was fucking amazing. I have always been very humble about the Bison. They were crazy awesome.

Cheer and Dance

From the moment we received her long-winded explanation of how she wanted the team to run, we knew it was a perfect fit. Look at that bold-faced bossiness from a woman we’ve never met. We’re going to get along just great. And we really did. Every practice was filled with yelling and laughter. The three of us naturally worked well together and because we enjoyed practice so much, the team did as well.

The good ol’ days

We had so many team highlights, particularly performing at Grey Cup, as well as games.  Games were amazing. Each was so exciting. Every fan knows that though; we have such a great fanscape here in Winnipeg. During our first year together, we invented stunts a lot. Carrie and I loved creating stunt sequences and skills that we decided in our imagination would be perfect. Our athletes were tough as hell and always down for our stunt experiments. I used to tell them about new stunts like it was the most enthralling story since Harry Potter; culminating in the climax…a stunt of such magnificence and perfection that we could barely survive the excitement. The stunt would be legendary. Voldemort is dead. They adopted a ‘catch everyone’ policy and that is how they trained. Catch. Everyone.

Many of the athletes we coached came from our University team so we didn’t need to teach any basic stunts. They came to the Blue Bomber team after a full year of competing against other collegiate teams and were ready for some gentle, non-stress performance in front of 25,000 people. We did have overlap in the fall when athletes were on both teams (and we coached both), however, we were lucky in that most athletes could forgo sleep in lieu of practice, which we recommended all the time. We had a few old guys on the Blue Bomber team. They were in their thirties, geriatric athletes basically, and we called them all ‘Dad’.

The Field Goal idea

One evening Carrie and I were sitting around creating stunts. Usually this meant watching the most skilled team we could find, like Team Thailand, and then rejigging their sequences so our athletes didn’t die. We even named one of the stunts the Team Thailand. Every stunt had a fun name. I want to list them here, however, I know children might stumble upon this website and I would need a special waiver for this article.

On this particular evening of creation, we decided we want to throw a person over the goalpost. A field goal stunt. We had thrown the athletes over a multitude of objects and people; the stunts were called group to group basket tosses. They are in the most difficult calibre of stunting because one full base group (typically guys) tosses a flyer toward another group and ideally, they catch said flyer. There is a point in the air when just…no one knows who should catch. “Me? You? You guys got her? No?! Shit! Us??? OMG!!!”

Throwing people over things

Learning group to groups was a scary journey. By the time we became CFL coaches, we had evolved our group to groups from a straight body launch to a front flip and then twisting; eventually tossing over people and objects. We had our flyers grasp hands and spun them like a helicopter from one group to the next. We threw them over TV cameras and we even threw a flyer, accidentally, right over a football player that was running off the sideline. Touchdown!

As we planned our field goal stunt, we discussed the height of the crossbar with our team after some pondering and then concluding that this was, in fact, a brilliant plan. Ten feet, we told them. You kids can throw ten feet up, can’t you? Totally, they told us. We can totally get someone over that crossbar. We had a few flyers we planned to toss over and one of them, our usual ‘experimenter’ who did some of our toughest skills, evaluated our plan like the engineer she is now. I’d like to think her necessary knowledge of physics, in order to save her life as a flyer on our team, is what led to her to an incredibly successful engineering career. You’re welcome.

Risk assessment

She looked at the crossbar, did some math in her head and told us that ten feet is a manageable height but the crossbar had length to it that we couldn’t see from beneath it. That meant that our arc had to be high enough that the flyer cleared the crossbar and long enough that they didn’t hit the lip on the other side. The guys, many of which had played football, agreed the height wasn’t the issue. It was the distance we needed that could be problematic. An angle that’s too low would send a person into it and too high, they’d land on it. Tough call. We decided to go for it.

Ideally we would flip over top of it. In my mind, that was the easiest option because if they were flipping and saw a crossbar coming at them, the flyer could put their hands on it and vault over. A somersault in the air, but with a bit more effort. Remember I told you how handy those are? Flip the body, save the neck. These were the simple solutions I conveyed to the team before asking them to risk their lives for our goalpost stunt.

Initiating the launch sequence

After much discussion about how we would practice the stunt before actually using the goalpost, we determined our best bet was to make a ten foot crossbar with bodies. We would use our team to create  the goalpost. At our little community centre, we set up a girl (flyer) on top of a guy’s shoulders (base) and did the same with another group. Two sets of two people stacked on top of one another. Boom! Goalpost. We had the bases stand parallel to one another and the flyers clasped hands. The working theory was to toss the flyer from one side, over their arms, and to the other. If we could clear ten feet with arms, we could clear it on the field. Theoretical.

We told the goalpost flyers to drop their arms if the tossing flyer was going to hit them so it didn’t slow down her momentum (she needed to make it to the catch group on the other side). We put the Dads in the tossing groups because in their old age, they were the most experienced and we trusted them to catch any flyer who was falling in any position, no matter what. They would sacrifice their own body, like a human cushion, to ensure no flyer hit the ground. I believe this was partially due to experience and partially due to the fear of my reaction if they dropped a flyer.

In fact, I threatened to chop off the pinky fingers of one of the bases on the team if he didn’t perform to a certain level. After his fifth world championship, I told him he could keep his pinky fingers. We have had amputations on the team; not caused by me directly but that could change anytime.

Ready, set, toss!

The athletes who tried this stunt for the first time, the Field Goal stunt, are the bravest people in the world. It is amazing and successful now but I cannot believe we pulled this off. They had only one another to rely on and trusted that it was an attainable stunt (which I obviously promised them it was…considering I made it up in my head and it looked fucking outstanding). We always tossed high flyers but this stunt, we had never seen it. But somehow, we knew we could do it.

We set the human goalposts up, put extra catchers on the sides and began with our usual circle of safety. This is where the ‘catch everybody’ part of the practice comes in. We had athletes bracing the bases on the bottom so that if a flyer (goalpost) was hit by the ball (other flyer), they didn’t drop all the things (people). The first toss we did was just a little tuck; get in a small ball and clear the arms. That was the goal. Surprisingly, it was very easy. We really over-exaggerated it in our minds and told ourselves to pray to any deity we could recall. It was quite underwhelming. We immediately made it harder. The team was actually disappointed with how well it went on the first try. Where’s the fun in that?!

Inspired by Disney

We asked the flyers to do a swan dive over the arms of the other flyers. A swan dive is similar to Pocahontas diving down the beautiful waterfall in a perfect flying arch. The only difference is Pocahontas was able to land in water and we needed our flyer to finish the flip and land safely in the catch group. It’s easier to throw a ball (although I’ve never tried); it’s hard to throw a person. You can’t miss that shit, you know? In cheerleading, every stunt is like the Grey Cup.

A few were scary. One went straight up and unfortunately, straight down. The toss group became the catch group and it was terrifying. A few times the tossing flyer went crooked and nailed one of the ‘goalposts’ (other flyers) causing a mass body collapse and necessary water break. Whew. Everyone ok? Cool. Let’s try again.

Evolving the Field Goal

The stunt eventually worked and it was decided we wouldn’t throw the flyer over the actual football goalpost because we couldn’t set it up, toss, catch and get off of the field fast enough. We had a short period of time and it would be dangerous to rush such a big skill. Safety first. Instead, we decided to throw the flyers on the cement sidelines and over the moving camera as it came rolling directly at us mid-stunt.

We began with the same small tuck in the games, moved to a front tuck (front flip) and when they were ready, multiple different flyers learned to swan dive over the human crossbar of awesome and into the catch group. We played with variations, new positions and pushed our stunts to the highest level we ever had. That team had stamina. We were always big tossers but the Field Goal stunt rocked the house.

The stunt is still performed today after every field goal. Only that first team of stunters will remember the perils involved with creating such a legendary celebration for field goals. I think it’s actually just as exciting as a real field goal.

But not quite as exciting as a Grey Cup win!

WINNIPEG BLUE BOMBERS!

2019 GREY UP CHAMPIONS!

KEEPING FLYING BOMBERS!