When CheerForce owner, Becky Herrera, logged onto the ASGA Facebook page this fall, she discovered a plethora of posts about a company that was using existing cheer logos to make doll clothes without the gyms’ permissions. This was familiar territory for Herrera, who’d previously discovered the CheerForce logo being used on bows and other apparel—without more »
Talk about power in numbers—when the All-Star Gym Owners Association (ASGA) speaks, people listen. Whether it’s getting an event producer to reconsider its stance on stay-to-play, tracking down answers and assistance from a MIA vendor or righting an industry wrong, the ASGA is able to exert influence via its ever-growing Facebook group 3,000+ members strong.
Professionalism, the importance of checks and balances and family are three of the moral tenets that ACX Cheer owner Randy Dickey lives by. Actually, if it were up to him to reorder those terms, family would come first, specifically Dickey’s wife Amie (whom he met in college at an Atlanta honky-tonk) and his 9-year-old daughter Macie. “I honestly think that, in cheerleading, the way you treat your family will show through in your character in the industry,” he says. “[When] people treat their family bad, disrespect their marriages or do things like that, [that behavior] says a lot about who they are in the industry. I believe that your family comes first.”
Randy Dickey of Columbia, SC-based ACX Cheer thought so highly of Kyle Wright that after cheering for ACX, Randy asked Kyle to run his gym in Charleston. “Athlete, coach, gym manager, Kyle does it all,” says Dickey of Wright’s work today.
Like many other cheer professionals, Wright was initially a gymnast. When asked to cheer in high school, he was hesitant at first but finally gave in because, “I figured there would be girls there.”
Has the quest to make cheerleading a sport finally hit its stride? With the formation of College STUNT Association and STUNT, USA Cheer’s answer is an emphatic “yes.” Designed to meet Title IX requirements, the sport of STUNT follows a four-quarter format focused strictly on athletic and technical skills including partner STUNTs, pyramids, basket tosses, group jumps and tumbling. All teams must perform the same choreography and technical sequences, and there is no crowd-leading element—differentiating STUNT from both school-based and all-star cheer.
Currently, USA Cheer is taking steps to secure STUNT as an NCAA emerging sport, but not everyone in the cheer industry believes that STUNT is a step forward. We spoke with Randy Dickey of ACX Cheer and Kim Gaskin, high school cheer coach and president of New Jersey State Coaches Association, to find out their perspectives.
While teaching a profitability seminar at the 2012 Worlds, ACX owner Randy Dickey made a startling discovery. “Out of 160 gym owners, not one raised their hand when I asked this question: how many of you know your hourly expenses for running your company?” remembers Dickey, who also leads the All-Star Gym Association.
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