‘For me, it was about the sisterhood’
Former Eagles cheerleaders reflect upon 75 years.
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Cheryl Williams didn’t know how to get to Veterans Stadium.
She had an audition there, and time was ticking, so she did what many young adults in a bind do — she called her mom. “Get on 95 [South] and take the Betsy Ross Bridge,” her mother said, and Williams was able to find the stadium.
Once there, she joined hundreds of women seeking the same thing — to become an Eagles cheerleader.
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Williams is one of scores of women who have cheered for the Eagles over the past 75 years. The squad has seen significant changes, from the uniforms to the role it plays.
At the end of that late spring day in 1993, though, Williams was on her way to becoming one of just 36 Eagles cheerleaders.
The Willingboro native didn’t grow up wanting to cheer for the Birds and auditioned on a bit of a whim — she loved to dance and cheered growing up but didn’t have formal dance training. That love worked in her favor as she navigated the audition process. For the first rounds, the judges would line up prospective cheerleaders in rows and have them freestyle to music. As the list was culled, the hopefuls would learn a routine and perform it.
One of the women alongside Williams in 1993 was Maggie Trush Hammond. Unlike Williams, she’d always dreamed of becoming an Eagles cheerleader and was inspired by the cheerleaders of the 1980s as she watched football games with her father. She didn’t make the cut in 1992 but went through the process again the next year. After the four-week process of dancing and interviews — which featured questions that ranged from typical (“What do you think the Eagles cheerleaders represent in the community?”) to personal (“What would you do if your boyfriend decided he didn’t want you to be a cheerleader?”) — her name was called. Williams recalled that 742 women were at the initial tryout, and she and Hammond were among 15 rookies picked in 1993.
“It’s like winning Miss America,” Hammond said. “You cry, you put your hands over your face, you jump up and down. … It was a dream come true, and I would say it was as exciting as finding out I passed my nursing boards, if not more.”
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The woman running the show at the time was Marylou Tammaro, a former cheerleader herself. She made the squad right after graduating from Archbishop Ryan High School for Girls in 1972, returned for one season in 1976, and was hired as assistant choreographer in 1981, when the “cutting-edge” squad was becoming more dance-focused and was known as the Liberty Belles. From 1984-2001, she served as either choreographer or director and held both roles in the late ‘90s. She has seen that emphasis of innovation carry into today.
“When you watch the evolution of the sport and the dance over the years, it’s a feel-good moment when I get to go to the games and I get to see them,” Tammaro said. “We were lucky to have the support for all three of those ownerships [Leonard Tose, Norman Braman, and Jeffrey Lurie]. And that really came through in how the squad progressed over the years. We were able to keep up to date. We were able to be cutting-edge; we were able to be leaders among the other professional cheerleading squads.”
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Janet Harding, who cheered from 1999-2008, is one of just 12 women to have cheered at Veterans Stadium and Lincoln Financial Field. She remembers using the MLB away locker rooms to change at the Vet before they got their own space at the Linc. She also cheered as the era of social media dawned — “Girls would come in with MySpace, and security would be like, ‘Yeah, we’re getting rid of that,’” she said — and has seen how the organization has adapted to that new reality.
“What hasn’t [in] changed all the years is that they always do such a good job of keeping it current and so that the public wants to see it,” said Harding, who cheered alongside current director Barbara Zaun. “Things change, but things stay the same. Sometimes that’s good because tradition is a good thing. … There’s so much tradition in the organization and in the cheerleading program.”
On the field — and in the community
Williams remembers her mind racing as she sat in the squad’s locker room ahead of the Eagles’ preseason home opener on Aug. 8, 1993, preparing to make her debut.
“I know I made this squad, but this is really it,” she said. “We’re really going to go out there and perform in front of 65,000 people. It just so happened, that first routine we had to do, I was the first person out of the tunnel. … We came back at halftime, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I love this. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’ Because it was so much fun because I was just out there having a good time and making people smile.”
That goal of making people smile extends off the field, too.
Williams has fond memories of shooting the calendars and traveling. Cheer took her all over the world — to Super Bowl parties in Canada and Puerto Rico, to Japan in 1999 as part of an “all-star squad” with other teams’ cheerleaders, and to Hawaii, where in 2000 she became the first Black woman to represent the Eagles cheerleaders in the Pro Bowl.
Corinne Chun’s rookie year on the squad coincided with Super Bowl LII, but some of her most memorable moments were on military tours and other outreach. Chun, a Hawaii native, taught dance and cheer at her alma mater and the elementary school where she was a special-education teacher. But she wanted more, so she auditioned for a variety of squads on the mainland. She was drawn to the Eagles because of their familial atmosphere as well as the organization’s commitment to outreach, particularly the Eagles Autism Foundation.
“I really fell in love with how family-oriented, and it’s not just the Eagles; it’s everything in Philly,” she said. “We all root for each other. We’re all very supportive. It has that similar feel to the area I was raised and the area I came from in Hawaii.”
She wasn’t on the field for last year’s Super Bowl, but instead on a military tour to Japan, where she watched the game with military members and their loved ones.
Marla Congialdi-Viturello, a cheerleader from 1996-2002 and captain from 1997-2001, particularly enjoyed the charity work. She was on the squad during a difficult time for her personally — her sister, Judi, died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2000 after a two-year battle, and having the squad around her helped.
“For me, it was about the sisterhood and the support that I had on that team and through the coaches, and it was such a beautiful outlet for me,” she said.
Nowadays, men dance alongside the women, too, though Sharon Sweeney, who cheered from 1966-68, says men were part of the squad as early as 1983. During her time on the 60-woman squad, then known as the “Eaglettes,” the team played at Franklin Field, and the cheerleaders were unpaid dancers (their pay was two tickets to the game) — though Sweeney implemented sideline cheers during her time as director from 1971 until February 1985 — and were part of the Sound of Brass, a 110-piece band that also featured a championship baton-twirling team and color guard.
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Without Sweeney, the squad may not exist. There was no squad in 1969 while Veterans Stadium was being built, but a phone call by Sweeney set the modern squad in motion.
“The man that I talked to was Bill Mullen, and he said, ‘Sharon Sweeney, do you coach Archbishop Ryan High School?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he had been a judge at several of the competitions that my cheerleaders were winning,” she said. “So he said, ‘No guarantees. You put a squad together, have tryouts, and I will present it to the Eagles.’ So I did exactly that. I put an ad in The Inquirer and a few other newspapers, and I sent letters to the high schools, and I had tryouts at Archbishop Ryan High School. And 150 girls tried out that were either seniors in high school or already out of high school. And I picked a team, and the Eagles came to a rehearsal and watched it, and they said, ‘OK, we’re going to go for it.’”
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‘Beyond the beauty’
The squad needed uniforms, so Sweeney designed a look similar to today’s retro kelly greens. Tammaro wore those uniforms, and when she returned in 1976, the squad wore A-line, sequined outfits and boots. When Williams and Hammond started, the one-piece uniforms featured long sleeves, high necks, kelly green, and rhinestones — “I loved that uniform,” Williams said.
During her time, the look shifted to an athletic aesthetic — shorts and a sports bra — and midnight green. Harding cheered during the era of Vera Wang-designed uniforms and remembers a powder blue and yellow retro look from the Birds’ Franklin Field days.
Congialdi-Viturello, a career nurse who now works in the medical legal industry and co-owns a pharmacy, says she has seen a shift in society’s perception of cheerleaders and noted a conscious effort by cheerleaders across the league to help the public “see the brains beyond the beauty.”
“The prototype of the cheerleader and the reputation and the image of a cheerleader has changed and evolved so much more over the past several years,” she said. “In the beginning, years and years ago, cheerleaders were always perceived as airheads or, [for] lack of a better term, floozy, or a sexual object on the field, and I think the appreciation has grown so much to understand that each woman is a professional. They’re educated. They have careers. They have professions. They have families, husbands, children, and I think that is something that has evolved greatly over the past several years. And they’re athletes.”
And while the look and the dancing on the field may be different, there’s one big constant.
“We’re ambassadors for the Philadelphia Eagles organization and the NFL organization,” Former cheerleader and choreographer Carethia Thomas said. “You take it as a professional job, to represent the organization in appearance and speaking and engaging. We did a lot of appearances where we had to interact and socialize with other people intellectually and socially.”
Added Tammaro: “The first meeting after we selected the squad, I would say, ‘This is not just about cheering on the sidelines. You are representatives of the team from now on. You have to realize that you are a member of the Philadelphia Eagles organization. Everything that you do will reflect back on that organization.’ We were lucky over the years to have really quality women who took that to heart, and they represented the squad extremely well.”
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Life after cheer
Hammond cheered until 1998, while Williams remained on the squad for nine years until 2002.
“It’s a hard decision to make because you figure for nine years, I’ve been around the organization,” Williams said. “Every football season, Eagles home games, I’m there on the field, and now I’m not. It was a hard decision to make, but I felt like it was my time to hang up my pom-poms.”
None of them are on the field on game days anymore (Chun cheered from 2017 through last season), but their experience had a lasting impact on them, and they’re still connected to the squad and the team. Hammond serves as the president of the Philadelphia Professional Football Cheerleader Alumni board, and Chun is a decade rep for the group. Harding also is a member, and Congialdi-Viturello, who also served as choreographer for the Arena Football League’s Philadelphia Soul cheerleaders for six years, is the sponsorship chair of the Philadelphia chapter of the NFL Alumni board.
Both groups engage in charitable efforts throughout the community, and Thomas is particularly proud of the group’s charitable efforts — including a dance to “Do You Remember” by Jay Sean that raised $100,000 for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure organization. Meanwhile, Williams is in her 31st season working for the Eagles, now as a concierge supervisor — though she’s still dancing.
Now when she sees an Eagles logo, whether it’s on a car or on the uniform of a current cheerleader, she feels a swell of pride.
“I always think about when I was one and what I did and how I interacted with the fans and everything,” Williams said. “And it actually makes me smile to see the cheerleaders now because I see that they’re engaged. They’re really bringing the fans in, interacting with the fans, building a good rapport with the fans. … I feel like they’re still great ambassadors of the organization.”
Said Tammaro: “In all my years, there has never been a time when I wasn’t proud to be a member of the organization but also to be involved with really tremendous women. Being an Eagles cheerleader, it was absolutely wonderful, but it wasn’t their primary goal. You had women who were teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, researchers, physical therapists, you name it. … They came to all the practices and all the games and everything on top of leading ‘normal lives’ and having careers. I’ve just been so tremendously proud of them over the years.”
Staff Contributors
- Writer: Maria McIIwain
- Editors: Gustav Elvin
- Designer: Luke Reasoner