Bringing Cheer to the UFL

By Nation Hahn
UFL-Football.com

Last month the UFL announced that prominent Central Florida choreographer and dance instructor Billie O’Hara would serve as UFL Cheer and Dance Development Director and Director of the Florida Tusker Cheerleaders. The original press release mentioned her 20 years of experience in the dancing world. She attended numerous prestigious dance schools and has served on the faculty of the Dance Conservatory of Orlando and Academy of Performing Arts. She is a former Orlando Magic dancer and she has danced professionally for the Orlando Predators and various musicians. Reading her resume, however, could not begin to scratch the surface of how busy she has been in the past few weeks as she has sought to put in place dance/cheer directors in all UFL markets.

“Over the past four weeks we have heavily recruited nearly seventy dance and cheer directors for our markets,” commented O’Hara. “We narrowed it down to about 25 in-person interviews which proved to be a difficult task. We had an outpouring of resumes from folks who have danced on NFL, NBA and AFL teams. We had former Cowboys cheerleaders, Laker girls and Raiderettes. You name it and they were represented in the mix. Omaha, in particular, proved to be a difficult market as we had a huge amount of talented professionals interested.”

All of the potential dance/cheer directors proved to be qualified according to O’Hara. Eventually Brian Melekian, the Director of Business Management for the league, and O’Hara made the final decision on the directors for Omaha, Hartford, Sacramento and Las Vegas as O’Hara will serve as the Florida director. O’Hara said that, “It was so difficult to make the final decision but eventually Brian and I reached a decision on the four directors.”

This weekend, May 7th through 9th, will mark the 1st Annual UFL Cheer Directors Convention as the various directors will fly into Orlando for a meet and greet that will also serve as a kickoff meeting to get each of the directors off and running in their markets. Following the convention auditions will be held in each UFL city, likely in June in each of the markets. Potential UFL cheerleaders and dancers can look forward to information on auditions coming out next week so stay tuned!