It’s strange and unexpected. But a quarter of the Laker Girls have a UCLA bachelor’s degree in world arts and cultures.
On one hand, with their gold and purple short shorts and tight midriffs, Laker Girls don’t exactly embody the archetypical image of academics, even though most (80 percent) of them are full-time college students or have already graduated.
On the other hand, most people would never think about the Laker Girls and WAC in the same breath. What Laker Girl Manager Lisa Estrada considers diverse (“hip hop ... jazz ... cutesy-fun little numbers like Elvis Presley”) is a far cry from what the world arts and cultures department would consider diverse (flamenco, polka, Polynesian). A few of the Laker Girls even grew up idolizing J. Lo when she performed in the early ‘90s as a Fly Girl dancer on the television show “In Living Color.”
Believe it or not, many Laker Girls have graced the UCLA hallways beside other highly accomplished UCLA students. These girls embody hard work and accomplishment, and bend the cheerleader stereotype.
“You would never guess that I was a Laker Girl at school,” said third-year world arts and cultures student Shelby Rabara. “I don’t wear any makeup. You’ll find me usually in sweats and a hat. When my friends in world arts and cultures are like, ‘Oh she’s a Laker Girl,’ people are like, ‘Really?!’ It’s just funny.”
The Laker Girls from UCLA are all extremely driven individuals. After all, just getting into UCLA is tough enough (in 2003 more than 45,000 students applied for admission but only 4,390 were admitted). Now imagine beating out 500 of the top dancers in Los Angeles for a dream job performing for one of the best NBA teams.
“I’m really big on meeting goals,” said 2003 UCLA alumna Nicole Rush. Rush is currently in her second season as a Laker Girl and has been dancing since age 3, a time when most of her peers were probably finally perfecting their walk.
Once the girls have made the team, the next challenge is maintaining their busy schedules, which often also include UCLA classes and other jobs.
“There’s some 40-odd games as well as rehearsals in between and appearances,” Estrada said. “It is grueling in the sense of their schedules.”
Last year, 2004 UCLA alumna Charlene Bittinger was a part-time Laker Girl, full-time UCLA student and film production intern at Sony Pictures. And when current Laker Girl and 2003 UCLA alumna Lindsay Dennis cheered for the Clippers for two years while attending UCLA full-time, she also completed work-study at the UCLA Medical Center.
“I barely had a life,” Dennis said.
Sometimes study time comes whenever there are short breaks in their schedules.
“If we get ready early before the games,” Rabara said, “and we’re already stretched, you’ll find some of us studying.”
On game days Rabara will often go directly to Staples Center after a full day of classes for Laker Girl rehearsal, hours before the actual game, and leave after the game ends at about 10 p.m. From there, she may travel to rehearsal for a separate professional non-profit dance company that lasts until 1:30 a.m.
Sleep time revolves around her hectic schedule.
“I pay for parking at school,” Rabara said. “If I have an hour and a half break, I’ll be taking naps on campus or I’ll go to sleep in my car. I’ll try to sleep any place I can sleep, except for lecture.”
With all the sacrifices they make and their irregular sleep schedules, the girls still find supreme fulfillment in their lives.
“My inspiration comes from my mom,” Rabara said, “because she’s a single mom and she’s managed to support three kids by herself. She never gave up. She really instilled in me hard work.”
Needless to say, the Laker Girls are an accomplished bunch. That’s partly because Estrada and the Lakers organization don’t only look for a great dance audition, they want a good job interview as well.
“We do want someone who is going to be articulate, who is going to be intelligent,” Estrada said, “and also has the knowledge of how we want a Laker girl to act. We’re also looking for a role model for kids.”
Dennis can attest.
“At the tryouts, at the point where it reaches 60 girls, everyone is an amazing dancer,” she said. “You have no idea. It really is about then how they talk and whether (Estrada) feels we can represent the team well.”
So if most of the Laker Girls are driven academics, why are the girls from UCLA majoring in WAC?
UCLA’s only dance program is a dance concentration in WAC, which focuses more on cultural rather than commercial forms of dance. For some Laker Girls, like Dennis, who graduated with a degree in sociology after switching from WAC, this fact was hard to come to terms with.
“They didn’t offer any jazz classes, which I wanted to be more involved with,” Dennis said. “They had more cultural dances, which is cool, but it just wasn’t my thing.”
Other Laker Girls are more outspoken when it comes to the WAC program and its focus.
“I had to struggle all four years,” Rush said. “The fact that I only had a jazz year for my fourth year of college is absolutely ridiculous. I’m not going to knock the culture aspect of it and analyzing a lot of parts of dance. I just don’t understand why you would accept someone into a program knowing their background (in more commercial dance).”
World arts and cultures professor of choreography/performance Victoria Marks acknowledged the majority of WAC students do come into the major with backgrounds in jazz, ballet or cheer, but she also admitted that jazz has not been a focus of the department. But according to Marks, the department is at least making strides to have more hip-hop classes.
The Laker Girls tradition actually began with girls from UCLA. In 1978, a year before Lakers owner Jerry Buss bought the team for $67.5 million, he invited pom girls from UCLA and USC to perform with band music at Laker games. After the initial setup went over extremely well, the Laker Girls became an official part of the Lakers organization when girls selected from the auditions were hired as part-time employees.
Today the Laker Girls have become what many would call the best dance group in the NBA.
“The Laker Girls is the most respected dance team in the NBA,” Rush said. “And I know that many people feel that we’re at the top of our game.”
Each summer anywhere from 500 to 800 girls, from both inside and outside of the state, meet to audition for the prestigious position of Laker Girl. Even professors like Marks can appreciate the dancers.
“Having seen the Laker Girls, I think they’re extraordinary,” Marks said. “To be a Laker Girl is a real achievement. It’s a measure of an enormous amount of success.”
Part of the Laker Girls’ success is due to the success of the Lakers basketball team itself. With a string of championships in the past few years, the Lakers have risen to the forefront of NBA basketball.
Practically everyone already knows the Lakers, so naturally it would seem that more people would know about the Laker Girls. And as Estrada pointed out, if people are Laker fans, they’ll probably be Laker Girl fans.
Laker Girl Nicole Irving, a 2004 UCLA graduate, was recently surprised by the great number of international fans the Lakers have while she was performing in NBA Madness, an NBA touring event, in the Philippines.
The girls themselves are also huge fans of the sport and, specifically, the team.
Before Rabara ever thought about becoming a Laker Girl, she wanted to be a Laker, while Irving grew up going to Lakers games at the Great Western Forum with her father.
“My dad was a season ticket holder,” Irving said. “I remember going to Laker games from a very, very young age. And I come from a very Lakerish family, very strong Laker fans. The first thing they asked me (when I made the team) was, ‘Do you get tickets?’”
The girls, most of whom started dancing at about age 4, are also obviously passionate about dancing and performing. In her first two seasons as a Laker Girl, Irving, who graduated this past June, was also a full-time student. Rather than seeing it as a part-time job, Irving saw being a Laker girl as an outlet from the stresses of school.
“During finals when I was really busy or stressed,” Irving said, “it was a really good outlet for me to be able to go and just enjoy performing for that amount of time.”
Los Angeles also happens to be, next to New York, an epicenter of dance. Most of the best dancers in the nation are either located in Los Angeles or New York, so the girls auditioning to become Laker Girls are the best of the best.
The Laker Girls also like to say the success is due to their clean reputation in the community. They serve as an arm of the Lakers organization, participating in many charity and non-profit events year-round and have helped in events of the YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, Special Olympics, March of Dimes and the Make a Wish Foundation among others.
Keeping a clean reputation also involves close surveillance of one’s own behavior at all times while in public view.
“I was at the airport (recently),” Rush said, “A lady stopped me and asked me if I was a Laker Girl. So you really need to worry about how you carry yourself. We’re ambassadors so you need to carry yourself with the utmost respect and dignity and know that people are looking up to you as a role model.”
Paradoxically perhaps, the Laker Girls are known just as much for their clean reputation as their sex appeal.
“I think that those women are considered to be very beautiful,” Marks said. “There’s a kind of allure to that and even a sexiness about that.”
But the girls don’t see themselves as necessarily sexual.
“There is definitely a public perception (of us as sexual),” Rush said. “But we all see ourselves as artists. Not everyone can remember steps and coordination. It’s a talent. My senior piece was on the empowerment of women. You could look at it as exploitation. You could look at it as being sex symbols. We live in a society where sex dominates most of the entertainment industry, so it’s not weird to hear, because it’s reality, but we’re not there to ooze sex appeal. We’re there to dance and we see it as an art form.”
And while some cheerleaders, Dennis admitted, are there to ooze sex appeal, the Laker Girls are different.
“You could compare the NBA to the NFL,” Dennis said. “I think people look at the NFL as having very good-looking girls like the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, whereas the Laker Girls are actually very respected for their talent. I want to perform.”
Bittinger was also quick to brush off whether the Laker Girls receive any extra attention from men.
“I guess so ... and it’s a really good sports team,” she said.
According to Irving, the Laker Girls also have maintained a good reputation for not crossing the line between players and cheerleaders. Contrary to what most people would believe, the Laker Girls rarely even talk to players, except at charity events.
Furthermore, the Laker Girls seldom receive special perks or VIP access with their positions.
“We don’t get any perks,” she said. “We don’t get invitations to certain parties or clubs. But as Laker Girls, when we’re doing certain events, especially if we’re working at a benefit for children’s research for a hospital, we’ll get credentials to go sign autographs in the VIP lounge. But that’s just because we’re working. It’s not because we’re socializing there. So that’s the only perks we get, I guess.”
Of course, that’s excluding performing with OutKast and Beyoncé at the NBA All-Star Game, meeting Magic Johnson and being cheered on by Denzel Washington and Jack Nicholson.
Laker Girls receive perks all right, but they don’t want to make people jealous.
Despite enjoying some of the perks of being a Laker Girl, the girls still see themselves as normal.
“We still are known as the ‘world famous Laker Girls’ and that’s huge,” Dennis said. But also people may look at us as maybe more celebrity than we really are. If you talk to them, they’re like ‘Oh wow, you’re actually kind of normal.’”
So how do the Laker Girls muster up all the energy needed to study and dance? It’s part passion for dance and part passion for the sport of basketball.
“When it’s fourth quarter, twenty seconds left, or .4 seconds for Derek Fisher, you can just imagine the adrenaline rushing,” Rush said. “The experience is amazing. The audience is one. If you don’t feel any energy, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”
And sometimes the excitement of the audience doesn’t even come from the game.
“People will do anything to get on the jumbotron,” Rush said. “When little kids see themselves on the jumbotron, it’s a life-changing experience.”
The most important support, of course, comes from their families and friends.
“(My mom) asked me if I was going to school,” Rabara said. “That’s the first thing she asked me, which is funny. She was really excited for me. She’s my number one fan.”
Being a family member of a Laker Girl and getting free tickets can’t possibly hurt either. Especially if a loved one is just as much a Laker fan as you are.
“Just to see a Kobe shot in the second game of play-offs is worth while. (My family) definitely appreciates that. And my dad definitely has a (Lakers) flag on his car,” Rush said.