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Thursday, July 3, 2008

Crean Speaks at IU CHEERLEADING Camp!

My wife is an all-star cheer coach at Elite Cheer and Dance in Clayton, and last weekend she took a bunch of her girls to a stunt camp at IU. For those who don't know, (I've been around cheerleading for about 9 years) a stunt is pretty much anything that goes up into a pyramid. Okay, so she tells me that the basketball coach came and gave a motivational speech to the around 500 cheerleaders. My first thought was "Way cool" and then....I just wondered why he would go talk to a bunch of cheerleaders. Isn't there something better that he can be doing? But then I realized how much of an impact a little speech can have. These girls probably have no idea that this is the coach of one of the most storied programs in history but when they go home and tell their parents what happens, that leaves a mark with their parents. He understands that he is going to have to take a grassroots effort to bring this program around to where it was at one time. My boss, a diehard IU grad and fan compared it to something that the late Terry Hoeppner would have done. His speech was based on something along the lines of "don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't do something, if he would have listened to all the people in his life, he wouldn't have gotten anywhere. Follow your dreams and don't let other people make all the decisions for you."
Pretty cool thing for the head coach of Indiana University to do and I applaud him. I think he is doing the right things to turn the program around and he might have just been talking to the future cheerleaders who will keep the cheering going during timeouts in the years to come.