Argos cheerleaders huddle up to prevent bullying

ROBERT MacLEOD
The Globe and Mail
May 10, 2011

As the students gazed upon Casey N. decked out in her Toronto Argonauts cheerleader uniform, it was hard for them to comprehend that she had been a victim of bullying.

But she had, in Grade 9 in Winnipeg.

During a class, her fellow students started giggling after the textbooks had been passed out. “I didn’t know what was going on,” Casey recalled of that moment when she was 15. “I can hear my name being whispered back and forth. I open my textbook and in my textbook on the inside cover it says, ‘Casey is a big fat slut.’

“I look at the person sitting next to me, there’s something really awful written about me in their book, too, and the person in front of me and the person behind me.”

Every text book in the class had something untoward written about Casey in permanent marker so that it could not be adequately covered up.

It was something she had to relive for the rest of the school year each and every time she had that class and the textbooks were distributed.

“Back then, I didn’t have Facebook,” Casey said. “But to me, that was the equivalent of Facebook. Instantly, 36 people saw something really horrible written about me and they talked about it.”

Casey, now 26, is the newest ambassador in the Argos’ efforts to combat bullying in schools.

For 10 years the CFL team has operated its Huddle Up bullying prevention program that started with players being sent to schools in the Greater Toronto Area to speak out against bullying.

Over the next week, the football team will be staging its fifth annual Huddle Up Student summits that will bring together student leaders from the GTA to share ideas that helped keep their schools safe from bullying behaviour.

The campaign, the only one of its kind in Canada involving a professional sports team, was spearheaded by Jason Colero, who is the Argos manager of community relations.

While a Grade 9 student in Toronto, Colero was constantly picked on and ostracized by many of the other students because of his small stature.

He said it nearly drove him to suicide.

Over the past two years, when it became apparent that bullying affects girls as much as boys, the Argos sensed their cheerleaders could do more than just shake their pom-poms.

The women – who do not want their last names published over safety concerns because of the public nature of their cheerleading jobs – are now a significant component of the Huddle Up campaign, regularly speaking to groups of girls in high school and elementary settings about bullying.

Both the Argos cheerleaders and the players are trained by the Canadian Safe School Network (CSSN) on how to properly counsel the students they speak to about bullying.

“Usually cheerleaders are only used as an accessory to an event where the players are the focus,” said Beth Waldman, an Argos spokesperson. “We’re the first CFL team to use our cheerleaders as actual mentors in a community outreach program.”

The main message they deliver is that the first step to stop the spread of bullying is to tell a person in authority – a teacher, a parent or a police officer – that they are being harassed.

That is not always the easiest choice if the person is being picked on because he or she is overweight, a loner or is struggling with grades.

Judging by the reaction of the contingent Casey recently spoke to at Harold M. Brathwaite Secondary School here, the endeavour is proving worthwhile.

“It was powerful,” Chantaine Green-Leach, a Grade 12 student at the school, said after the presentation. “I couldn’t even eat. It’s great to know that there are successful people out there with stories like this who we can relate to.”

Brigitte G., another of the Argos cheerleaders who is involved in Huddle Up, said the girls she speaks to view them as a role models.

“During one presentation one of the girls stood up and proclaimed that these other girls had been basically bullying the entire school,” she said. “She told us she wasn’t going to let it happen any more. That was very empowering for me.”

Studies in Canada have estimated that as many as one in five school-aged children have been bullied.

Stuart Auty, president of the CSSN, said a recent school board survey of 8,000 students in Winnipeg revealed that 50 per cent of respondents reported being bullied.

Auty said 9 per cent of those students said the problem was so bad they were fearful of going to school.

While both girls and boys will resort to physical violence when bullying, girls will often add a more covert psychological twist.

They utilize social networking websites such as Facebook or MSN to post derogatory comments about other students that quickly spread throughout the school community.

That form of bullying is commonly referred to as cyber-bullying.

“Now you’ve got bullies who’ve got weapons and more and more of them are girls,” Auty said. “The girls are significantly active in this whole Internet realm.”