GTM Spotlight: Scott “Crasher” Braasch
Scott “Crasher” Braasch’s nickname is hard to ignore—especially in cheerleading, a sport that tends to frown on crashes of any kind. Braasch is quick to mention that the nickname doesn’t reflect how he drives or stunts, but the Cheer Tyme titan still remembers the moment he got the moniker, when his wild-eyed, excitable high school football coach congratulated him after a game-winning play.
“He grabbed me by the face mask and said, ‘You’re the Crasher, Braascher! You crashed ’em!’” Braasch recalls.
The nickname started off as a joke, but “Crasher” as a concept has informed the way Braasch coaches—by viewing his back spots, bases and flyers as individual athletes with unique skills, just as a football team would its quarterbacks, running backs or offensive linemen. That also means requiring his athletes to train with drills, conditioning exercises and sport psychology.
“I’ve always had sort of a very authoritative way of coaching, and it’s been something that my athletes responded to,” he says. “I got into cheerleading in its very early stage, when cheerleading was trying to fight for its sport identity, [and] it really was a blessing for people to see somebody like myself who approached it truly like it was a sport.”
A series of career-ending injuries cut his football career at the California University of Pennsylvania short, but a former football buddy of his (the first male cheerleader at the school) and Braasch’s girlfriend (also a cheerleader) encouraged him to come to the games and, later, join in on stunting. The prospect of being surrounded by females—and tossing them in the air with the ease of flipping a coin—certainly helped convince him.
“I remember the first time I did a walk-up chair and thinking that was the coolest thing ever in the world: ‘I can’t believe I just picked this girl up and held her up,’” he says. “It was probably a year later that I was going full-up awesomes and rewinds.”
He was instantly hooked on the sport. He watched TV competitions and VHS tapes of top squads to study up on new stunts and gain inspiration for creating his own. Now, in the YouTube age where VCRs aren’t necessary, he owns three Cheer Tyme locations in Pennsylvania and Virginia. He even invented the Full Up Machine, a four-inch-tall rotating contraption that looks like the cushy top of a barstool, to help flyers learn and stick their full ups, half ups and double ups. Braasch says the machine enables mobile repetition, which is key to nailing stunts safely—but without beating up back spots and bases, a nearly unavoidable casualty of the learning process.
Braasch says the response to the Full Up Machine was very positive, but the machine is no longer being manufactured by Core Athletix, the company that helped develop it. He hopes to see it rise again in the future, he says, but until then he has several other top-secret inventions in his back pocket.
Safety in the industry has long been one of Braasch’s top priorities. He says he wants to emphasize simple cheerleading basics like “step, lock, tighten” and “perfection before progression” to increase safety in stunting, which has become more complicated—and, thus, potentially more dangerous—in recent years. Next up for Braasch is his newly won national at-large seat for NACCC, where his top goals are to 1) unite cheer coaches, 2) increase communication among gyms of all sizes and locations and 3) make it easier for parents of potential cheerleaders to see that the sport is a safe one.
“We have to be more and more safety-conscious. When we put pro athletes in jeopardy, then we put our sport in jeopardy,” he says. “Those things can’t happen if we want to have longevity as a legitimate sport and a respectable sport. Otherwise we’ll create things so crazy that they’ll look at us like the early days of the UFC, which was just unsafe, and was frowned upon. It’s already tough in the media as it is.”
In fact, with his new position, you could say that he’ll be the Crasher all over again.
“I don’t think that will ever go away,” he says. “For whatever reason, it has stuck, and I guess it was meant to stick. It’s who I am.”