Saints Cheerleading Manager Says This Year’s Squad is Special

By Robin Miller
The Advocate

They’ll never pass this way again.

Oh, there will be other football seasons. There may even be another NFC championship.

But none of it will happen as it did this year, when the Saintsations fielded a “dream team.”

That’s what former LSU Golden Girl Lesslee Fitzmorris, the Saintsations’ manager, calls this year’s Saints’ cheerleading squad.

“We all knew that this season was going to be special,” Fitzmorris, of Covington, said. “We knew it last summer, when we had our retreat in Destin, Fla. Never have I had a group like this.”

First, squad members posed no intrasquad competition, meaning no one tried to outdo anyone else. Criticism was replaced by support.

Those attitudes forged an instant bond among the 37 — 34 Saintsations plus choreographers, Blair Buras and Eileen Arnold, and Mama, as Fitzmorris calls herself. The closeness had to be a good omen, right?

“I remember coming back from the retreat and telling coach Payton, ‘I have the Dream Team this year,’” Fitzmorris said.

Of course, as head coach of the New Orleans Saints, Sean Payton was working on his own dream team, one that’s played its way to the Super Bowl for the first time in the team’s 43-year history, a journey that somehow seemed predestined.

“We just knew,” said Brittany Hamilton, a political science major at LSU. Her sister Chrissy Hamilton also is a Saintsation and is a student in the Xavier University College of Pharmacy.

But Brittany Hamilton also knows that this group will never pass this way again. Friendships are lifelong, but Dream Teams are rare. Membership will change next year. Some members will leave; others may not make the team. And even if the Saints were to make a repeat Super Bowl appearance in 2011, it wouldn’t be the same. You have to have been there. But that’s past tense. The 2009 Saintsations are there now.

On Jan. 28, squad members, dressed in identical two-piece practice uniforms of black and gold, were running through their final home rehearsal before leaving for Miami.

“They have all kinds of uniforms,” Fitzmorris said. “They’re girls, so, of course they love clothes.”

But the most coveted perks are the game day parking passes.

“They say the pass, alone, is worth being a Saintsation,” Fitzmorris said.