Purple pep

Vikings cheerleader Krisandra Shimpa has spirit to spare as she juggles a management job at Target, the game schedule and a home life.

By Angela Busch
Special to the Star Tribune
October 4, 2009

If you watch tonight’s football game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Green Bay Packers — and most of Minnesota and Wisconsin probably will be watching — you’ll see Krisandra Shimpa. There she is, that shorter one in the front, bouncing curly blond hair, white cowboy boots — big kicks, big smile.

She’ll run out onto the field around 7:15 or so, bursting through the banner just before Brett Favre and Adrian Peterson do — out onto a Metrodome stage that sees Shimpa and her Vikings cheerleader teammates as a sort of opening act: a side salad to the main course of tackling and touchdowns.

Maybe you’ll see her, and you’ll notice how much she smiles or how high she kicks. Maybe you’ll see the cheerleaders as a unit, a team of women from some fairytale land where the abdominals are tight, smiles are white and no one ever steps out of the kick line. The reality is a lot grittier. There are injuries and sore muscles (just ask Shimpa, who has had to sit out a few practices with a strained neck). There’s practice: three times a week for three hours at a stretch, then more drills before game time.

Even off the field, it’s pretty obvious that Shimpa is a cheerleader. She has that excited way of speaking, even when it’s not a game day, and she talks a lot about just how happy she is in general. Energy explodes out of Shimpa. Her blue eyes shine when she talks about being a Vikings cheerleader.

“I just love the game,” she says, clenching her fist as she says it, looking as though after her next dance number she might want to run on the field and try blocking for Peterson. “This is my passion.”

Pep to spare

All that pep might seem forced, but Sarah Johnson, Shimpa’s younger sister who’s also on the squad, says that’s just Krisan being Krisan.

“It’s really her,” Johnson says, watching her sister lead her small group during cheer practice at LifeTime Fitness in St. Louis Park. “She’s always been really good at that. It’s just a gift she has. … We’re sisters, but even I don’t know how she does it.”

Shimpa’s not always cheering, though.

All of the Vikings’ cheerleaders are required to have a full-time job, be a full-time student or be a full-time mother, but Shimpa’s career exceeds expectations. She has been at Target since May 2007, working as a project manager in interactive marketing. She puts in at least eight hours a day there, sometimes more, sitting in a cubicle surrounded by photos of her family and cheerleading squads past and present.

When she’s not carrying pompoms or posing for the swimsuit calendar, when she puts on her business suit and heads to work in the morning, when she returns home exhausted to her husband of five years, when her joints ache after cheerleading practice and sometimes cause her to miss a drill or two — well, then the purple-and-gold veneer starts to peel off, and Shimpa starts to look a lot like the rest of us. Like any other 31-year-old woman trying to make it in the Twin Cities and figure out her life.

Giving 110 percent

Johnson says that she and Shimpa grew to love dance while growing up in Hillsboro, N.D., where their mom, Elaine, coached the high school dance team, the “Funky Divas.”

“Kris and I and our other sister [Lisa Mae] would have 6 a.m. dance practice every morning, then we’d stay after school for basketball or volleyball practice, and then we’d get up every morning and do it again,” Johnson said.

Shimpa parlayed that love of dancing and performing into a brief career as a magician’s assistant and dancer for Princess Cruise Lines. She got sliced in half and learned to walk with “sea legs,” but Shimpa missed the Midwest and moved to Minneapolis in 2002. She began her career as a pro sports cheerleader with the Timberwolves that same year, then cheered for the Minnesota Swarm lacrosse team in 2006 before joining the Vikings in 2007.

Vikings cheer coach Tami Krause has known Shimpa since she coached the Just for Kix camps that Shimpa participated in during high school.

“She embodies everything I hope for in a leader,” Krause said. “She is someone who’s in the spotlight, but it’s never forced. The spotlight seeks her out.”

When Shimpa had to sit out for a few practices because of a neck injury, “it was very frustrating to her,” Krause said. “She doesn’t know how to do something without her utmost effort. … She had to realize that she can’t always give 110 percent.”

Living in the moment

Balancing her passion for performing with the reality of day-to-day life has been Shimpa’s biggest challenge during her three years with the Vikings. She and her husband, Michael, sometimes have a tough time carving out space for each other during the football season.

“It might sound cheesy, but we created ‘M and K’ time,” Shimpa said.

And at age 31, there’s also the question of M and K and C — as in “child” — time. Shimpa considered taking 2009 off from the Vikings’ squad to try to start a family, but ultimately decided she had another year of cheering in her.

“I’m the kind of person, when I’m in something, I’m in it,” she says. “When I move on from this and start a family, that’s where my focus will be. When I’m at my office job, that’s where my focus is.

“But right now, I’m here [cheering]. This is what I’m in at this moment, and I’m absolutely going to put everything I have into what I’m doing right now.”