Cleveland Browns Cheerleaders? File this under “Speculation”

Browns Moving Toward Adding Cheerleaders for 2015 Season
Cleveland Scene
April 30, 2014

Want to rile up Browns fans, outside of the usual sticking points like talking about backup quarterbacks and the draft? Bring up the uniforms or cheerleaders. No fan base is more passionate about the clothing giant men wear or the women on the sidelines who wear very little. Both topics will be the subject of plenty of debate in the next few years.

As owner Jimmy Haslam and team president Alec Scheiner have previously said, the Browns will be wearing new uniforms, redesigned by Nike, in 2015.

And, according to a source in the organization, the team has also started moving toward adding cheerleaders for the 2015 season. The team has had meetings and started preparations to introduce a squad and is currently in the consultation phase of the process. Reached by Scene this week, the Browns declined to comment through a team spokesman.

As renovations at FirstEnergy Stadium march on toward completion before the start of the 2015 season, so do the Browns’ efforts to modernize not only the stadium but also the game-day experience. With the fancy scoreboards also come the wiener dog races, for example.

Some may say that tradition is still important for a team that hasn’t won anything of significance since Lyndon Johnson was in office. Others say the Browns have fallen behind and need to relate to a younger, more progressive audience. Bernie Kosar says a whole bunch of things, but none of them will be for the Browns’ preseason broadcasts (speaking of the team moving on from traditions).

The Browns are currently one of six NFL teams without cheerleaders, but contrary to popular belief, the Browns did once in fact employ cheerleaders back in the team’s earlier days.

In 2010, Bill Lubinger of the Plain Dealer wrote a piece explaining that the Browns did have cheerleaders multiple times. The most recent was in 1971 when high school girls in orange turtleneck sweaters performed on the sidelines (they were not paid, incidentally). He quoted Pat Modell, wife of former owner Art Modell, as saying, “We had them one year. They looked crazy. It was ridiculous.”

And so they will have them again. Hopefully, less ridiculous. But we’ll wait for Dee Haslam’s reaction.
Remember, the team’s vice president of fan experience and marketing is Kevin Griffin who came from Seattle, where he helped engineer one of the more engaging game-day experiences in the league and built goodwill with the Seahawks’ fans for open communication.

Will cheerleaders completely fix their recent image problem? No, of course not, but they wont hurt it either. The more your team’s name is out in front of children, the stronger their bond to that team will be.
Fans need to stop seeing the Browns through a pair of rose-colored shutter shade glasses. This is not the 1980s anymore and the Browns need to build a new legacy.

And other recent moves prove the Browns aren’t beholden to vestiges of their heritage as they try to stake out a new brand for themselves.

The team announced this week that they would be replacing native son Bernie Kosar on the preseason broadcasts.

Kosar claimed it was because of his slurred speech caused by years of concussions. While that could be part of the issue, it’s much more likely to be the fact that he berated an opposing third-string quarterback and was arrested for suspicion of a DUI last season.

While the alcohol related charges for this case were dropped on Monday, the PR damage was already done.
The truth is that Bernie’s issues have gone far past what transpired last season. It was just about 18 months ago that Kosar called into do an interview with Bruce Hooley on ESPN 850 WKNR and sounded, well, hammered.
I worked for WKNR at the time and can tell you that it was a huge ordeal behind the scenes and ended with Kosar “taking some time off” from our shows.

This is not a good look for the Browns organization that is desperately trying to shake the stigma of being bumbling fools.

So maybe it is time to move on from Bernie on our broadcasts. Maybe it is time to embrace a change in uniforms. Maybe it is time for cheerleaders to walk the sidelines at FirstEnergy Stadium.

2013 Cleveland Spirit

We haven’t heard much from Cleveland Spirit so far this season, but they did have auditions, they did choose a 2013 team, and that team just completed their first photo shoot. Visit their facebook page to see what they’ve been up to.

Congrats to this year’s team!

First Look: The Cleveland Spirit Cheerleaders

The newly minted Cleveland Spirit Cheerleaders made their debut today while the Cleveland Browns beat the San Diego Chargers. It looks like the ladies were in good cheer despite the rainy conditions and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of them. Hopefully the Browns will be a little kinder to these ladies than the Lions are to the Detroit Pride Cheerleaders. Click here to check out the Cleveland Spirit’s debut performance. Hey, if you have to wear brown, you might as well work it.

[Check out the Cleveland Spirit Cheerleaders on Facebook]

Remember when … the Cleveland Browns had cheerleaders? Really, they did!

Bill Lubinger
The Plain Dealer
Tuesday, November 30, 2010

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Pat Otto was on a business call a few years back when she noticed the bubble-wrapped frame on the floor of her client’s Lakewood office.

“I said, ‘Oh, my God, is that…?'”

It was — in all it’s sexless glory — an old Browns cheerleader outfit. Otto, an account manager for an employee-benefits firm, hadn’t seen one since she turned hers in after the 1971 season.

She was Patti Adamson then, a 17-year-old Rocky River senior and a Cleveland Browns cheerleader. She was one of 19, or 20, or 32. It’s been so long, no one seems to remember exactly.

The Browns? They had cheerleaders?

Yes, believe it or not, but they’re a mere footnote in the team’s storied past because they vanished faster than a fourth-quarter lead.

And because the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, they were not.

“We had them one year. They looked crazy. It was ridiculous,” Pat Modell, wife of the former Browns owner, said recently. “It was so cold in Cleveland that it almost looked like they were wearing wooly pajamas.”




Art Modell said in a recent phone interview he didn’t even remember the team having cheerleaders. Although some of the former cheerleaders recall being told at the time that it was her creation, Pat Modell said it was hatched by someone on Art’s staff.

“Whose idea was that?” she called out to Art in another room. “It was the biggest flop.”

Maybe, but a nugget of Cleveland football history nonetheless. And still meaningful — maybe more meaningful to some — with the passage of time.

“It was a blast,” said Robin Byall Paisley, a ’73 Rocky River grad and now a nurse in Portland, Ore. “To be out there in front of that crowd. At that age. Oh, wow, a Cleveland Browns cheerleader.”

The group was mostly juniors and seniors from local high school drill teams and cheerleading squads. They practiced on Saturday mornings at Edgewater Park, learning basic dance routines to the songs of director Frank Strasek’s Cleveland Browns pep band.

Perks were few. With no access to a dressing room, they had to arrive on game day in uniform.

And, oh, those uniforms. Strictly Pittsburgh Steeler-chic: white satin knickers with brown stripes down the side, brown knee socks, orange turtleneck sweaters, orange and white pom-poms and saddle shoes.

“It was really unflattering,” Paisley said. “We kind of looked like referees.”

The cheerleaders performed only at home games. They weren’t paid, but were allowed to bring a chaperone, which their dads, brothers and boyfriends lapped up. They went largely unnoticed, except by Steeler fans, who, as one former cheerleader recalled, tossed garbage and beer cans at them.

Paisley and her older sister, Lynne, Otto and a few friends were all recruited by their Rocky River pom-pom coach, who they believe had a connection to the Browns.

So the teens didn’t have to try out. But they did have a page-and-a-half of rules. Among them: No gum-chewing or consuming alcohol while in uniform. No excessive jewelry. No grooming on the field. No fraternizing with or dating the players. And, apparently, no cheering.

“One thing we could not do, we could not incite the crowd beyond, ‘Go Browns!'” said Lynne Byall Benson, now a college professor in Boston.

It’s not like they didn’t have something to cheer about that year. The Browns, under new head coach Nick Skorich, finished 9-5 before losing to the Baltimore Colts, 20-3, in the playoffs.

The cheerleaders were gone after 1971. Some actually quit before the season ended because it was so cold. They weren’t allowed to wear coats unless they all matched, but were told the Browns wouldn’t buy them.

They were to turn in their uniforms at season’s end, but Benson was so upset when the Browns reneged on a promise to invite them to the team’s year-end banquet that she kept hers. It’s still in a trunk at home.

The Browns have no record of the 1971 cheerleaders. No photographs. No mention in the media guide or game programs. They haven’t had cheerleaders since — one of the few NFL teams without them. The others: the Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, New York Giants and the Steelers.

The Browns actually fielded cheerleaders before 1971, but that fact has been misreported.

Former Plain Dealer Sports Editor Hal Lebovitz, answering a reader question in 1979, wrote that the Browns had majorettes with a team band starting in 1946, but only the one season with cheerleaders.

The Plain Dealer’s Emerson Batdorff reported in 1960 that the team debuted “a talented crop” of six cheerleaders that season, in white sweaters, brown corduroy shorts and white earmuffs.

The Browns have a 1962 photo of four women who fit that description. One was Elaine Hybil, now Elaine Arndt of Wisconsin. They were all Brush High School majorettes who got to be Browns cheerleaders because the school band director played in the Browns’ pep band.

There were six cheerleaders in 1961 and four in ’62, including Sheila Lefkowitz, now Sheila Myers of Beachwood, who said her sister was also a Browns cheerleader in the late ’50s.

“They probably were there so the women had something to watch while their husbands were intent on the game,” Batdorff wrote back then. “Coach Paul Brown thinks of everything.”

The experience in 1971 was definitely a mixed bag, said Rocky River grad Rita Salah, now Rita Allen, a retired consultant living in Belgium.

“Part of me doesn’t want to admit that I did this,” she said. “And part of me is pleased to say that I did.”