Life as an NFL Cheerleader: It’s Perfection, or Bust!

By Sam Cooley
Ottawa Sun

With her elbows bent and her upper arms exactly parallel to the lobby floor, Evony Thompson demonstrated a perfect pushup … because nothing less is acceptable at the NFL level.

“You have to do 25 of them,” she said. “Non stop.”

Thompson, 23, is a native of Tennessee and is also the youngest and most physically fit member of the Tennessee Titans’ cheerleaders.

She and three members of the cheer squad flew to Ottawa to meet with local fans for a promotional party in the Byward Market during Thursday night’s game against the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Though she is the newest member of the team, Thompson has carved herself a place of respect among the other 26 cheerleaders.

“She is our team fitness champion, two years running,” said Stacie Kinder, the Titans’ cheerleading director.

Kinder said her husband, an Olympian, puts the team through gruelling physical training sessions to prepare them for four hours of marathon-like dance routines during National Football League games.

Before getting a shot to sign a one-year contract, the women must pass four out of five elements of a demanding fitness test.

Thompson easily destroyed the tests like an Ottawan eats a BeaverTail. (The Titans cheerleaders said they had neither heard about, nor consumed, any of Bytowne’s famous BeaverTails while in the capital.)

“There’s a lot of things I want to eat, but I can’t,” she said.

Similar to other members of the squad, past and present, Thompson is a university grad in psychology and communications. She also has a full-time career at Tesla Motors, where she works as a product specialist.

Her colleagues on the team hold down jobs in accounting, entertainment and the legal field, among other pursuits.

Thompson views her commitment to the Titans as a professional hobby that is separate from her day job.

She said she first got her start in the automotive world while in school; during the summers.

“…to pay for school in cash I would buy cars from auctions and resell them for three times as much,” she said.

What it took to pass this season’s cheerleader test:

25 perfect pushups;
25 V-ups (an abdominal exercise);
100 step-ups within two minutes;
A one-mile run within eight minutes;
12 repetitions of a 25-metre sprint.
Four of five conditions must be met, according to Kinder, otherwise you don’t make the cut