Watching cheerleading genius at work in Birmingham is as simple as buying a movie ticket. If the showing you choose happens to fall just right, you’ll see Claude Cornelius “Happy” Hooper III—Happy Hooper for short—in a dark theater, hunkered down at a commercial film like The Hobbit, watching the screen but not entirely focused on what’s playing. Instead, he’s mentally projecting images of perfect formations and flawless pyramids rising, spinning and flowing onto the screen. It all plays into the bigger picture back at the gym with his award-winning squads at ACE Cheer Company.

“A lot of times in the movies, I will zone out and use the screen as a way to kind of see what I want—different transitions, formations, pyramid pictures and transitions [that are] supposed to happen,” he says.

In fact, if it weren’t for entertainment media—TV, movies, music—Hooper says the cheerleading-themed ticker tape that’s constantly running in his brain would never stop spooling. “I have to sleep with the TV on, and if I’m ever [alone] in a room, I have to have music playing. Otherwise, I’m always just thinking about cheerleading,” he says.

Though it’s hard for Hooper to narrow down his favorite films, he’d probably go with The Goonies or Steel Magnolias (a pick he attributes to “the Southern woman in me!”). It’s hard not to notice that both have ensemble casts: ragtag individuals banding together to overcome assorted problems. In the truest sense of the word, they’re teams—or, in ACE-speak, “tribes.”

So in-demand that he guest-starred on last year’s CMT reality show “Cheer” as the special guest consultant tasked with making over the Central Jersey All-Stars’ Worlds routine, Hooper is something of a legend in the cheerleading world. It’s not terribly hard to see why: watch that episode and you’ll see Happy—at first unassuming in a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers—go into full-on savant mode, giving the squad rapid-fire direction for a new pyramid, making tiny gestures and miming transitions in triple-time. It’s like watching John Nash scribble equations on the library windows in A Beautiful Mind. The girls look at him wide-eyed. You can’t blame them: it’s hard to keep up with a visionary like Hooper.

Hooper’s company, ACE All-Stars, has 58 squads in five states and employs more than 100 people. It’s a mini-empire in cheer world, one that requires constant attention. When the company was smaller, Hooper prided himself on personally coaching every team. Now that the company is more spread out, it’s impossible for him to shepherd all of them in person—though he wishes otherwise. (It’s clear that Hooper’s inability to be 58 places at once pains this perfectionist who admits point blank, “I like to win.”) So Hooper goes for the next best thing: viewing their routines via YouTube videos that his coaches are required to upload daily. They get his notes within 24 hours.

Credit Hooper’s steadfast work ethic to his upbringing—Hooper’s parents both coached high school sports, and his mom even has a gym named after her. “I was in the baby rocker, and I would either be at cheer practice, softball practice, football practice or basketball practice. I grew up not knowing any other way to live other than working hard,” he says. “Playtime was sports, so to me, life and play go hand-in-hand with what I’m blessed and fortunate enough to call my profession.”

Hooper first realized cheerleading was his calling when he saw Alabama compete on-screen at UCA College Nationals, thanks to a rare glimpse of cable during a visit to his aunt and uncle back in the ’80s. “To this day, I remember their entire routine was to ‘Rockit’ by Herbie Hancock, and that was just the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” he says of the “a-ha” moment. “I knew I always loved cheerleading, but the competitive side, I’d not really seen.” There was no going back: Hooper was officially enamored with that slice of the sport.

He went on to cheer on scholarship at Sneed State Community College in Boaz, Alabama, for two years, then Columbus State in Georgia before coaching at University of Alabama and opening his first ACE gym in Alabama. He’s gone on to have incredibly high career highs, such as winning Coach of the Year and Worlds in 2011, and low professional lows, namely closing his Columbus, Georgia, gym four years ago. (Families from the area now drive three-plus hours to Birmingham or Atlanta in order to cheer at one of Hooper’s gyms.)

“Knowing when a gym isn’t making you money, when to call it a day, that’s very tough. As humans, we let our pride and ego get in the way,” he says. “You have to be a strong business person to know when to say when. You feel like you let everyone in the community down; you feel like you let down all the athletes. I took it very hard. But, financially, the company was much stronger after that.”

As for the state of cheer today, he has two major beefs: the idea of “cheerlebrities” (“After we got off the floor last year in Dallas, there were people pulling two of my athletes to take pictures with them… That’s not okay. This is a team sport; it is not about individuals”) and professionals’ desire to splinter off into disparate groups, which he says damages the industry as a whole rather than bettering the structure that already exists.

When it comes to giving advice to cheer professionals looking to replicate his success, he has dual keys to surviving and thriving: classes and communication. “Classes are going to make you money and afford you the luxury to hire who you need,” says Hooper. “[As far as] communication…even if you can’t answer an email right then, I stress to my staff and everyone in the industry to at least reply: ‘I have received your email, I don’t know the answer to this as of yet, but I will get back to you.’ And I try to put a little caveat in there, that if you haven’t heard back from me within a day, send me another email, call me.”

Though Hooper is the heart of the operation, he’s quick to share the success with those around him. “I get a lot of the—I don’t want to say ‘glory,’ but I don’t know a better word for it—but I would never be able to do what I do without everyone within the company,” says Hooper. “We have business directors, gym directors, and they all work their butt off for me and for the company. Our turnover is virtually none, which I find very warming to my heart that we must be doing something right. We retain staff, and we just get to add to our family.”

In the movie of Happy Hooper’s life, that sounds like a true happily-ever-after ending.

–Jamie Beckman