They flip. They fly. They twist. They tumble. And they cheer.

Meet the Kansas cheerleaders, 30 students who work overtime to entertain fans during football games. Some have been cheering and tumbling since they were young, while others played other sports in school before coming to the University and realizing they wanted to be a part of KU Cheer. But all have one thing in common — they want to make fans excited during games.

Take Scott Borgmeir, for example. In high school, Borgmeir, Overland Park senior, could do a back flip, but his true sport was diving. He joined his high school cheerleading squad anyway and decided to continue in college.

Then there’s Lizzie Bellinger. Bellinger, Plano, Texas, senior, joined her high school’s cheerleading squad during her sophomore year as a joke, but by the following year, she knew she wanted to cheer in college. There’s even a joke about her in her family — she is 4-foot-10 and has brothers who were very athletic in high school, but she’s the one who got an athletic scholarship to a university. She’s been on the KU squad now since her freshman year, and this month she was featured as SportsIllustrated.com’s cheerleader of the week.

These two, as well as the other 28 KU cheerleaders, put in hours of practice every week to give a great performance at every football game. They lead the crowd in cheers and perform stunts during lulls in the game to make fans’ times more enjoyable. And they carry on a tradition of a great game day atmosphere at one of the biggest sports schools in the country.

What it takes

Corey Stone, cheerleading coach, says there’s a lot that makes the University appealing to potential cheerleaders. For one thing, he says, they cheer at very few losing games between football and basketball. Then there are the tryouts. The squad’s Web site, kucheer.com, lists numerous skills needed to make it through to the final stage of tryouts: Standing back handsprings, roundoff back handspring tucks, toss chairs, and many other skills that seem like a foreign language to the untrained eye. But the applicants have a variety of training.

“The guys, they have a lot of different backgrounds,” Stone says. “The girls, most of them have been tumbling for 10 years.”

A former KU cheerleader himself, Stone cheered when the squad won the National Cheerleaders Association’s national contest in 1995. He was in a five-year program and watched the cheerleaders tumbling at games. He’d taken gymnastics classes in high school and was inspired.

“I saw guys tumbling and thought, ‘I could do that,’” he says.

Stone cheered at the University for four years and continued on to assistant coach the cheerleading squad at the University of Iowa along with his wife Nami, where they both got their masters degrees. Now they’re both coaching the squad here.

They hold tryouts in May for the next year’s squad during one stunt-filled weekend. Last year, 35 girls and 22 guys tried out, traveling from as far away as Texas, Colorado and Chicago. Only 30 made the cut. When the list of new squad members is posted, the work begins.

Practice makes perfect

After the cheerleaders make the team — 14 girls and 16 guys — they are committed to attending practice twice per week and workouts at 6:30 a.m. twice per week. Those sessions prove valuable for improvement in both athleticism and cheerleading skills. Borgmeir used his time in the morning workouts throughout college to work with a nutritionist to put on 45 pounds of muscle.

The team practices cheerleading skills at G-Force Athletics, 725 N. Second St., on a springboard floor covered with mats. It’s a good thing, too, because stunts, pyramids, tumbling and basket tosses can take lots of practice.

“When you don’t have it exactly perfected it can be scary,” Bellinger says. “I’ve actually kicked a guy in the chest and he somehow caught me.”

Stone says the cheerleaders learn their stunts in a progression, starting first with an easier stunt and slowly adding difficulty as the earlier ones are perfected.

“You don’t try a flip and twist before you have a straight twist,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t injuries in that progression. Stone says the team endures about two concussions per year and a number of minor injuries in between.

Borgmeir can attest to that. He’s broken his nose, dislocated his thumb twice, hurt his neck and he’s no stranger to having shoe prints all over his body from stunts that weren’t yet perfected.

“You get tore up,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean he gives up.

“If your partner gets hurt, you don’t have a partner,” he says. “I get frustrated when I drop a stunt.”

On the field

When game time comes, the cheerleaders know it’s time to get the crowd excited, something that can be challenging because the cheerleaders are so much farther away from the crowd than where they are during basketball games.

“I get the opportunity that a lot people don’t get in college,” Bellinger says. “It’s kind of being the face of KU.”

Football games allow for more elaborate stunts after a change in rules that made some stunts illegal on hard ground, like a basketball court. That opens the door for bigger stunts, such as basket tosses, when girls are thrown high into the air by multiple guys.

So how exactly do the guys balance girls on their hands for cheers?

“The girl is supposed to be tight up there like a piece of wood,” Stone says. “The girls have to figure out how to turn off their balancing instinct, which is sometimes hard for gymnasts to do because they are so good at balancing themselves.”

Borgmeir says guys learn pretty quick how to get the girls up on their hands, but it takes a lot of balancing and a slight move of a hand can make the girl fall, something Bellinger has experienced before. In her time on the squad, she’s had a concussion and once thought she’d broken a hip, although it turned out to be a bad bruise. But she says girls just learn from it and get over any problems they might have with their partners.

“If you don’t trust someone, you’d better get over it,” Bellinger.

Borgmeir says the squad, which is split in half on opposite corners of the stadiums for the games, has multiple responsibilities during the game. They fill empty time, they help step up the atmosphere and they bring excitement in between plays.

“It’s our job to get the crowd involved,” he says.

And there’s always room for improvement. Borgmeir says cheerleaders never hit a plateau of skills or get bored.

“You can always learn something new every time you do it,” he says. “There are always new skills to try and can always be getting better at it.”

When the game is over

Both Bellinger and Borgmeir graduate this year, but they’ve taken a lot away from their experience as cheerleaders, both on and off the field.

Borgmeir’s made his time cheering permanent with a tattoo on his foot of a Jayhawk with a megaphone, the cone the guys use to make their yells heard better. He’s one of eight guys who are either currently on the squad or have been in the past to have the tattoo. It’s a reminder of the people he’s met on the squad and the experiences he’s had, and graduating won’t erase those.

“I don’t think I could just get rid of it,” he says.

Bellinger says she’s learned time management skills and made lots of good friends during her time on the cheer squad, but that time is almost up.

“It’s kind of bittersweet,” she says. “I’ll probably come back.”

Stone says cheerleaders get a lot of great memories and friendships from their time on the squad, and he’s even seen members get married.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he says. “It’s part of college atmosphere — marching band, cheerleaders.”

But in the end, there’s one main purpose to the squad — getting the crowd excited for the KU game at hand.

“Ultimately, we just hope that they’ll yell with us,” he says.