One of the Kennesaw State cheerleaders who knelt in protest before a football game last year said she does not believe the athletic department’s decision to keep her off of the cheerleading team this year was “skills-based.”
Former cheerleaders Tommia Dean, Taylor McIver, Kennedy Town and Michaelyn Wright — four protestors who took a knee during the anthem last year — were “disappointed” after they did not make it back onto KSU’s cheerleading team after tryouts in May.
Dean’s brother Davante Lewis and the five cheerleaders’ spokesperson said that, “in that disappointment, there were some questions.”
“While she knows she’s not cheerleader supreme, she knows the skills she has versus some of the other girls who have made the team,” Lewis said. “And so it is a question because she just doesn’t buy into the argument that this was an entire skills-based decision.”
KSU’s athletics department released a statement on Monday, Aug. 20, saying that seven of the cheerleaders on last year’s team did not make it back onto the team this year because the number of applications for the team increased from 61 in 2017 to 95 in 2018.
“Similar to all KSU sports teams, multi-year spots on rosters are not guaranteed and all student-athletes must earn their position on a team,” it said in the statement.
Lewis said that some of the new applicants this year came from the cheer coach’s private cheer team, which he said he recruited to apply for the competition team. The athletic department attributed the increase in applicants to the cheer team’s recent success in the 2018 NCA Collegiate Nationals.
Out of the 47 members in last year’s team, seven did not make it back onto the team, and approximately 57 percent of the students taken off the team account for the cheerleaders who protested last year.
“I saw it as a great PR coverup,” Lewis said. “The facts just don’t match up. I think it would have been hard press for them to have all five be cut, and I think their story would be more believable if they kept one and dropped some others.”
Lewis said that, while the five cheerleaders are still talking, they are no longer speaking or acting as a collective voice, meaning that any actions being taken by any of the five cheerleaders are based on their own individual choices.
The only one of the five cheerleaders who protested last year that made it back onto the team is Shlondra Young — the only senior amongst the five.
Lewis also said that he does not know if the cheerleaders had any plans in continuing protests before they were cut from the team. None of the five cheerleaders have responded to requests for comment.
Dean has already moved on from cheerleading, Lewis said.
“Of course we want the real conversation to be about some of the issues pushing Kennesaw and Cobb County and Georgia and really focus on the more serious issues on police brutality, racial inequality and social justice,” Lewis said. “And hopefully that message in this upcoming election and new environment be lifted up more.
“At the end of the day, that is why she did it. To lift up those stories and those messages, and her plan is to just hope that those stories actually get talked about more than her action because her action was just to raise awareness of those stories, not to take those stories out of the conversation,” Lewis continued.
