NAVARRA TAVARRO

VARIO

Front row, Allie Ross, Head Coach Monica Aldama,

Morgan Simianer; back row, TT Barker, Jerry Harris.

America has
flipped for
cheerleading
coach Monica
Aldama and her
powerhouse team.
By Chris O’Connell

Photographs by Drew Anthony Smith

junior college in the

world it would be a
nondescript scene. It’s
midmorning during
the early spring
semester, and a young woman in gray
sweats and a baggy T-shirt, her
blonde hair wet, stares at a bright
phone screen as she sits cross-legged
on the top floor of the school’s main
gym.

But this is Corsicana, Texas, the only

city in America with a junior college
whose students have recently
appeared on television shows with
Oprah and Ellen, walked the red
carpet at Hollywood events, and been
personally spoofed in a skit on
Saturday Night Live.

That student killing time before class isn’t

just any student. She’s Lexi Brumback, one
of the stars of Netflix’s recent smash hit
Cheer, which followed the Navarro College
cheer team through its 2019 season en route
to winning the school’s 14th NCA
Championship. She is famous now, and not
just for her impressive tumbling, but for her
heart-wrenching backstory and plucky
spirit.

If you binge-watched Cheer when it was

released in January, but failed to follow the
various characters on their promotional tour
or Instagram Live updates, you might be
confused to see Brumback on the Navarro
College campus. In the final episode,
Brumback made clear that she was no
longer on the team after finals in Daytona,
Florida. But alas, she’s back, thanks to a
second-chance given to her by Coach
Monica Aldama, BBA ’93, Life Member.

When Aldama walks by, Brumback lights up.

“Hi, Monica!” she says, her lips curling into
an instant smile. In Brumback’s line of work,
one of the main objectives is to appear
cheerful even when she may not be. Aldama
greets Brumback warmly.

But this is genuine, at least as far as I can

tell. Brumback may be having another
troubling social media interaction (like her
Twitter kerfu!e during Cheer) or simply
being a college student, inundated with
tests and bills and a social life early in the
morning. But when Aldama approaches,
something in her changes.

Since Cheer aired, Aldama has been

characterized in divisive terms. Actress
Reese Witherspoon cried joyfully over the
power of female leadership Aldama
conveyed. The Atlantic called her leadership
style as “take-no-prisoners” and the coach,
in the middle of her 26th year at Navarro as,
“an authority figure [her cheerleaders] dare
not question.” Whatever you believe, Aldama
is unflinching in her approach to coaching:
that it’s more than teaching a team of
cheerleaders how to build a pyramid or point
their toes. It’s a family a"air, and sometimes
families fight.

“Some need the motherly touch. Some need

discipline. They all need something
di"erent,” she says. “You figure it out, and
you figure it out pretty quickly.”

how to win at Navarro College pretty

quickly, too, winning her first NCA National
Championship in her sixth season as head
coach. But Aldama, a McCombs graduate,
never saw cheerleading as a career.

Her family moved from Alabama to

Corsicana when she was 6 years old, and
she started in gymnastics shortly after. If
she was born 25 years later, she might have
gone straight to cheerleading.

“It was way di"erent when I was young,” she

says. “There weren’t opportunities like there
are now. You have All-Star cheerleading and
you can grow up from basically when you
come out of the womb.”

Aldama cheered in junior high and high

school, and just before graduation, she
remembers hearing the words “All-Star,”
indicating the first of a few big culture
changes in the sport. Attending Tyler Junior
College, she joined the cheerleading squad,
but once she transferred to UT, she left it all
behind.

“I loved it but I wasn’t planning on coaching,”

Aldama says. Equipped with a finance
degree, she dreamed of working on Wall
Street. In the interim, she married her
husband, Chris, and they moved to Dallas,
where she took a job at a computer
company. About a year in, the son of her
cheerleading coach from Corsicana High
called with an opportunity. He was the
Navarro College assistant baseball coach,
and noticed an opening for head coach of
the cheerleading squad. Their lease in Las
Colinas was coming to an end; Chris was
already commuting to Waxahachie for work,
about equidistant from Dallas or Corsicana;
and, most importantly, she hated her job.
She figured she’d apply and worry about
everything else later. New York wasn’t going
anywhere.

“I thought it was a stepping stone,” she says.

“I’ll stay here for a little bit and decide what
we want to do.” Her o#cial hire date was in
January 1995. She still hasn’t left.

For the first few years, Aldama lived in both

the cheer and business worlds. She enrolled
at UT Tyler in the MBA program and would
work all day trying to build the then-
lackluster cheerleading program, drive 80
miles to Tyler, take classes, drive back to
Corsicana, get home around midnight, and
do it all over again the next day. She was
pregnant with her son Austin when she
began and pregnant with her daughter Ally
when she graduated.

And it’s not like she signed up for some

turnkey coaching experience at Navarro.
There were only 14 cheerleaders on the
roster and the team had little-to-no name
recognition in the sport when she arrived in
December 1994, before her o#cial start date.
The team had no coach to bring them to
nationals, then in Dallas, so she took them
without really knowing any of the kids.

Instead of bailing and heading into business,

though, she combined her two worlds. She
created a business plan for the cheerleading
team: Looking at the end goal and making a
plan to get there, she says.

That end goal was having a fully functioning

program where she could recruit the best
talent in the world. To get there, she needed
to win, and win soon. Winning, for this self-
proclaimed “numbers person,” was as simple
as figuring out the best way to score the
most points in a way that other coaches
were overlooking. In addition to poring over
VHS tapes she ordered from previous
competitions for style inspiration, she made
a calculated move: she’d exploit the
scoresheet.

Simply put, the scoresheet is the total

possible points for di"erent skills: building,
tumbling, and overall performance. Aldama
jumped on the opportunity to max out points
in each category, rather than just try to put
together the flashiest program.

“[Other coaches] had a mentality of, ‘We

need to do the hardest thing we can here
without looking at the big picture,’” she says.
“I looked at it as, ‘We can get points in this
category or this category or this category,
and we are not going to focus on one thing,
we are going to get the most points we can.’
That’s the education I got in business
school.”

Recruiting back then was di#cult without

name recognition, so she’d drop in on the
college’s weight room, she says, to “find
some guys who looked like they were big
enough to throw some girls around and try
to teach them whatever I could.” And she
didn’t exactly have the best top girls and
tumblers to choose from, either.

“I didn’t inherit some great program,” she

says. “It was a lot of blood, sweat, and
tears.”

Every year, though, the team got closer to

her goal, scoring more points, getting more
name recognition at competition, and, in
1998 and 1999, coming in second place, the
school’s highest-ever finishes. The following
year, Navarro College won nationals, and
Aldama’s squad never looked back. They
have since won 13 more times—including
five Grand National Championships, meaning
scores higher than every other school,
Division I universities included—and two in a
row.

Along the way, Aldama gained a reputation

for becoming the best coach in
cheerleading, and the insular world of the
sport noticed. It wasn’t until Cheer, though,
that the rest of society took heed. Today,
neophytes like me know what a basket looks
like, how important mat talk is, and why they
call Aldama “The Queen.”

Aldama’s team practices its record-

shattering routines is not particularly
pretty, even now. But access to it has
changed significantly since Cheer.

Before Netflix descended on Corsicana,

students and passersby could catch a
glimpse of the best cheer program in the
nation, if they knew to look in that very gym.
(The show portrayed many locals as being
rather oblivious to the paramount success of
the squad.) Not anymore. Today, the
windows of the practice gym are covered,
either by red film or curtains. A local police
o#cer is stationed by the door. There have
been “several incidents,” I am told, without
any specificity, but the implication is clear:
these men and women are, in the age of
social media, celebrities. But in the gym,
during Daytona Season, they sure don’t act
like they are enraptured by fame.

Attending Navarro Cheer practice—even just

the warm up portion—is surreal in its
normalcy if you’ve seen Cheer. Around 12:30
p.m., the Navarro College practice gym is
empty, save for a few young women in
sweats laying on benches and staring at
their phones. As 1 p.m. approaches, a man
with quads like oak stumps starts rolling out
the mats. Then the familiar faces appear.
Allie carries a white plastic laundry basket to
the washers before helping tape up mats.
Morgan, bubbly and free, smiles her way over
to Allie, and the two stretch and goof
around. Jerry and James wrestle playfully.
Lexi, in UT sweats and a Naruto shirt, stares
sullenly into the distance as a male
cheerleader plays with her hair. I find myself
looking around for Gabi Butler, who is back
with the team but not around. It’s like an
episode of the show is playing out in front of
me.

I don’t know what I expected. Paparazzi?

Oprah? Morgan getting dropped o" in a
Bentley? It’s almost like they are real college
kids, just trying to get their associate
degrees while three-peating in Daytona. And
Aldama is just trying to keep winning,
cameras or not. In fact, she initially didn’t
understand why Netflix chose her.

“I told them,” she says. “I might yell every

once in a while, but on a day-to-day basis
that is not how I coach these kids. If that’s
what you’re looking for, then this is not the
team for you.” Netflix chose Navarro anyway,
and it paid o".

Cheer succeeds because it’s a show about

sports that’s not always about sports.
Aldama decided early on that she couldn’t
win at a junior college by being purely a
cheerleading coach—she would need to be a
life coach as well. The greatest sports
stories have this emotional underbelly in
common—Rocky did not win the 1976
Academy Award for Best Picture for its fight
scenes.

“I didn’t know how it would go, but the girls

rolled out of bed, their hair crazy, they didn’t
put makeup on, they didn’t become anyone
di"erent than who they already were,”
Aldama says. “Which I think was so awesome
and one of the reasons the show is so
popular—everyone was so raw and
authentic.”

Aldama attributes the success of Cheer to

the verisimilitude of the cheerleading
lifestyle, rather than some sort of fantasy
about what the outsiders could have
projected upon it.

“I wondered how the kids would react to

cameras being in there, too,” she says. “No
one was any di"erent. They rolled up, acne
and all. They didn’t care.”

From my short time in Corsicana, it appears

that what you see on Netflix is what you get,
for the most part. Aldama is who she
appears to be—tough but fair, the motherly
figure you strain to not disappoint.

Case in point: the day of her photoshoot for

this magazine. Aldama clearly relishes her
time at UT, specifically the foundational
knowledge she acquired at McCombs. So
when one of the main stars of the show,
Jerry Harris, is sleeping in that morning, his
teammates, all primped and primed for the
bright lights, take him to task, not unlike how
the team holds each other accountable
during a stunt. They FaceTime him, and a
groggy Harris answers.

“Get over here!” they insist. “And put the

black uniform on.”

A star college athlete has a decision to make

here. Does Harris need to roll out of bed and
be in a few shots with his coach? After
Aldama, he’s arguably the most famous
member of the team, with one million
Instagram followers and a recent stint
interviewing celebrities on the red carpet
during the Academy Awards. But that’s not
how all this works at Navarro College.

Within minutes, he’s there, the black uniform

on his newly slender body and that million-
dollar smile plastered on his face. Aldama
ribs him in a firm but gentle way: You
messed up, I see you, her face says. That’s
Aldama the counselor: Harris can’t expect to
oversleep important moments in his life,
especially now.

When Aldama sits for her Clockwise

portrait, Morgan Simianer from left,
Kassidy
hops into her lap, and her
Warnol,
coach gives her a squeeze.
James
Abandoned by her parents, Thomas,
Simianer was raised by her Jerry
grandparents, and Cheer Harris,
portrays the initially raw Morgan
talent as searching for Simianer,
maternal love. That’s Monica
Aldama.
Aldama the surrogate
mother.

But both moments are strands of Aldama

the coach. That Harris’ teammates held him
accountable is a product of Aldama’s
coaching philosophy. On the show, if
someone drops a flyer, everyone does
pushups. If someone misses class, everyone
runs.

“It seems to work so well because they

realize if they mess up, other people are
going to be hurt in some way from that,” she
says. “Show up if you have a job. Let’s all do
our job and hold each other accountable to
that level of excellence.” The shot is
objectively less compelling without Harris in
it, and the team knows it.

That Morgan felt comfortable enough to

jump into Aldama’s lap—and that Aldama
didn’t flinch—is another strand. She is fluid in
her methodology, and is adept at signaling
which team members need what from her.

“Some people want to be yelled at, they

want you to get in their face because it will
motivate them. Other people will melt down
and you will never get another thing out of
them,” Aldama says. “You have to know,
what does this person need? A gentle
confidence booster? For me to be harder on
them? You learn from their personalities
what they need.”

Andy Cosferent, Aldama’s right-hand man at

Navarro, figured out pretty quickly that he
needed to be in Corsicana.

In 2012, the Montreal native visited schools

in the United States because he wanted an
education here, and, importantly,
competitive cheerleading (especially back
then) wasn’t nearly as big as it is in the U.S.
He says he came to Navarro College one
weekend, and “completely fell in love.” He
cheered for Aldama through Daytona in
2015.

Even though Navarro College Cheer didn’t

have an o#cial assistant coach position until
the Cheer season, Cosferent volunteered,
driving down from Dallas whenever Aldama
needed him. He says they are extremely
close. Even though she is his boss, he can
turn to her with a personal issue, and, even
though he isn’t an 18-year-old “lost soul” like
some of her kids, she will still give him the
love he needs.

“If I have something where I need advice,”

Cosferent says, “she’s one of my top
people.”

Cosferent says Aldama has helped the team

members who appeared on Cheer deal with
their newfound fame. As a result, Cosferent
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says she might be doing interviews for six
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Monica.”