George Washington High’s cheer team got their red carpet moment, and a documentary about them is now streaming
“People don’t really expect us to come from low-income houses to win a national championships, but we know the talent that we bring and the motivation we have," one George Washington cheerleader said.
Two-and-a-half years ago, the George Washington High cheer team was selling lollipops and collecting change at coin drops in an attempt to scrape their way to nationals.
On Thursday night, they walked a red carpet as cameras followed their every move before the world premiere of a docuseries about their improbable, triumphant rise.
Spirit, the story of the 2022-23 team’s explosion on a national stage, is now airing nationally on Comcast’s Black Experience and streaming on Xumo Play. It was produced by basketball star Steph Curry’s Unanimous Media and directed by Philadelphia native Matt Howley, who learned about the team through a 2022 Inquirer story.
‘This is crazy’
Everything felt a little surreal Thursday night to Roland Williams, whom the cheer coaches talked into joining the team in his senior year, in 2022-23.
Williams was a football player, and thought it would be easy to throw girls into the air. He got an education about how difficult it was — and quickly became a team anchor, the most likely to lighten the mood.
“This is crazy,” Williams said, looking around at the Franklin Institute, packed with people eager to catch a glimpse of the team, to see its story play out on a big screen. “All these people are here to see us.”
Thursday felt a little like a class reunion — in the two years since the team finished 10th in the U.S., many team members graduated, went to college, started jobs. Williams now works as a building engineer trainee for the Philadelphia School District. Adamaris Lopez and her 2022-23 cocaptain, Irsida Kola, are both studying nursing in college: Kola at Holy Family University and Lopez at the University of Pennsylvania.
Curry couldn’t be there in person — the NBA point guard was busy scoring 56 points in a Golden State Warriors game in Orlando — but he sent greetings via video.
“I just want to say I’m so proud of all that you’ve done, not only for yourselves, but how you’ve represented the incredible city of Philadelphia,” Curry told the team. “Personally, it was moving to see you all on your journey coming into your own as young men and women and proving to the world that we are more than the underrated underdog.”
The first episode of Spirit, screened in the Franklin Theater, earned several rounds of spontaneous cheers. Some people wiped away tears.
In the film, Lopez talked about what the team was up against.
“A lot of us come from poverty,” Lopez said. “People don’t really expect us to come from low-income houses to win a national championship, but we know the talent that we bring and the motivation we have.”
Cheerleading requires significant commitment of time and energy from participants — and at George Washington and other Philadelphia schools, many student athletes have complicated lives and adult responsibilities.
Lopez, for instance, was called on to be the public face of her father’s fight against deportation.
When she was just 13, Lopez attended rallies and made speeches to help save her father, who spent nearly a year living inside a Philadelphia church. Eventually, Lopez’s father earned a path to citizenship, but even afterward, as her family’s oldest child and most proficient English speaker, she was responsible for helping take care of her younger brothers and assisting with the family business.
Aaliyah Armour, a sophomore in 2022-23, used cheerleading as a way to help heal from her father’s death from gun violence, which at first left her restless and ready to get in fights, she said.
“I tried to focus my anger onto something positive, so I wouldn’t go down the wrong route,” said Armour, who coaches young cheerleaders at her club cheer team, Oak Lane Wildcats, and who will graduate from George Washington this spring.
Coaches Michelle Sorkin-Socki and Veronica Hayes said they knew their team had much to overcome: the pressure of competing at such a high level, with many members who had no prior cheer experience, in an expensive sport that many start in elementary school.
And though Sorkin-Socki and Hayes asked a great deal of their team, they also knew cheer was only part of the kids’ sometimes complicated lives.
“Some practices you have to fight tooth and nail to make sure you’re here because you were up all night working because you had to make sure the bills were paid, or there could have been a shooting in your neighborhood the night before. We have to keep all that in perspective as we’re changing crucial elements of the performance,” Sorkin-Socki said in the episode.
“I can’t go up to a cheerleader on our team and say, ‘Listen, you can’t wear your New Balances because they don’t have the right grip,’ because that’s probably all they have at the moment,” Hayes added. “Sometimes the money has to come out of our own pockets, and they deserve it. I mean, these kids work hard. I don’t think any student athlete should ever have that fear of, ‘Am I going to get hurt because I don’t have proper equipment?’”
But mostly, the first episode was about the team doing what it did best: At a showcase at Archbishop Ryan High, halfway through their routine, the music died, and the team just kept going, counting to keep their pace.
They nailed the routine — and it felt like a turning point.
Before the episode screened, Howley, the director, said when he read the initial Inquirer story, he was struck by the power of the team’s mission: to prove that it belonged. (They often called themselves “Rocky with pom-poms.”) Howley looked at the auditorium, packed with glitzily dressed people, eyes fixed on the screen.
“I would say, ‘G-Dub, mission accomplished,’” Howley said, using the school’s nickname. “You belong, all right.”