Stillwater Area High School’s adapted floor hockey team was leading the Edina/Eden Prairie/Bloomington/Richfield squad 7-3 at the end of the second period Tuesday night when the spotlight turned to seven young women on the sidelines.

Ruby Noah, dressed in a red cheerleading T-shirt, went first. Ruby held up a large sign with the letter “P” on it and pressed a voice-recording button.

“Give me a P!” echoed through the gymnasium.

“P!” the crowd shouted back.

Members of the Stillwater Area High School adapted cheer squad hold up letters spelling out P-O-N-I-E-S during a game on Tuesday. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Next up was Camryn Handberg, dressed in a red cheerleading T-shirt and black cheer pants with a red-and-white stripe, and holding a pair of red-and-black pompoms. A friend, Ava Wilmes, held up a sign with the letter “O” on it behind her wheelchair. “Give me an O!” came the voice from Camryn’s voice-recording button.

“O!” the crowd shouted.

By the time the girls — seven in all — were finished spelling the six-letter word “Ponies,” the co-ed Stillwater team was pumped to return for the third period. They went on to win 13-6, keeping their undefeated record intact.

“Having the cheer squad at our games gives us more confidence when we play,” said Maddie Buse, a senior and captain of the school’s adapted floor hockey team. “I really like having them there.”

TRUST Club

The cheerleaders like being there, too.

This is the first year that Stillwater has fielded an adapted cheerleading squad. The squad is the brainchild of Lorrie Shortridge, a longtime special-education paraprofessional in the district, who was looking for a way for students with special needs to get involved.

Students of many different abilities play adapted sports, but some students aren’t physically able to play, Shortridge said.

“I said, ‘You know, we need an opportunity for kids who can’t play in the adapted-sports arena,’” she said. “They still want to go and be part of a team in some way.”

Shortridge and Erin Mathaus, another paraprofessional, worked last fall with parents, administration and the school’s TRUST Club, which stands for “Trust, Respect, Uniting Students Together,” to start the first adapted cheer squad.

The squad, which started cheering at the school’s home adapted soccer games in October, is “an opportunity for everyone to participate to the best of their abilities,” Shortridge said. “My passion is to continually bring awareness to the incredible abilities of these students. I want to open new opportunities each school year for inclusion.”

Members of the TRUST Club — dressed in matching red T-shirts with the message “Inclusion Is Our Cheer” on the back — come to practices and games to cheer with them.

Abi Kowalski, 15, of Woodbury, is typically paired with her friend Cathleen Costello, 16, of Oakdale. Cathleen was born with a rare genome variant that results in a seizure disorder that requires constant supervision. She is non-verbal, non-ambulatory and requires 24-hour support.

Cheer squad member Michelle Maina, right, presses the button on a speech device that repeats the cheer, “Let’s go Ponies, let’s go,” held by teammate Abigail Kowalski. Watching at left is teammate Cathleen Costello. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Abi and Cathleen are both in band and are both members of Pixie Park Crew, a group that builds adapted fairy landscapes and competes in competitions like DaVinci Fest, a free festival that promotes student art, science and film projects in the St. Croix River Valley.

Being part of the adapted cheer squad is great “because it’s a chance to include everybody,” Abi said. “Everyone’s just here to support everybody else. It lets everybody just feel welcome to be themselves. Even though we’re all a bit different, and we’re all unique in our own ways, we just can come together to be supportive of everyone.”

Being on the adapted cheer squad has been a highlight of Cathleen’s winter, said her mother, Danielle Costello.

“You just want your kid to have friends and be happy,” she said. “She loves being part of the cheer squad. She wants to go. She’s always very excited. The day that she has cheer, we talk about it in the morning, and she gets excited about it. On the way home from practice or a game, she’s very vocal that she likes it, and then she usually goes to sleep pretty quickly.”

Having Cathleen be part of the cheer squad is also a great conversation starter and a way to connect with others, Danielle Costello said.

“Everybody knows a cheerleader,” she said. “We had her 16th-birthday party a couple weeks ago, and there were some relatives who hadn’t seen her for over a year. They said, ‘What is she doing now?’ and I said, ‘Oh, she’s in cheer. She’s a cheerleader.’ Everybody can relate to cheering. Whereas with some of the other activities, like doctor’s appointments and therapies, people don’t know how to talk to you about that, but everybody can talk about cheerleading.”

‘Part of a culture’

Camryn, 15, also loves going to the adapted floor hockey games and cheering, said John Handberg, Camryn’s father, who lives in Maplewood. “She’s smiling, and she’s active, and she enjoys being around the other kids. She loves to dance.”

Being part of the squad has been a godsend this winter, he said. “It’s good to have something on the calendar, something to look forward to, especially in wintertime. When you come and watch and you see how many people are involved, and there’s funding, and there’s refs, and there’s coaches, and they’re cheering, and the parents are cheering, it’s pretty cool indeed.”

Camryn’s older brother, Cole, has played varsity sports throughout high school, and now Camryn gets a chance to “be part of a culture of athletics,” said Geri Handberg, Camryn’s mother, who lives in Cottage Grove. “Camryn has been a good sideline cheerleader for her brother since he was young, and now she gets to be the athlete in school by being part of the cheer squad. … As we age out of that with Cole, now we get to be in that with Camryn.”

Nathan Rosckes, of Stillwater, said he has enjoyed seeing his daughter, Anella Rosckes, 14, cheer on the sidelines.

“It really has been fun to watch,” he said. “You get to know some other folks in the community.”

Anella, who wears a cheerleading T-shirt and skirt to the games, loves being around people and thrives in noisy environments, he said. “She had a rough weekend, but she’s excited to be here,” he said. “She likes being anywhere where there is music or noise or commotion. There are not a lot of options. We try to keep her involved as much as we can in things, so this is great.”

Wearing their “Inclusion Is Our Cheer” shirts, adapted cheer squad members Michelle Maina, left, and Cathleen Costello cheer for the school’s adapted floor hockey team Tuesday at the school in Oak Park Heights. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The addition of the adapted cheer squad team “exemplifies how unified programming can change the culture of a school or district for the better by creating a community of belonging for all students,” said Caitlyn Willis, special-education director for Stillwater Area Public Schools.

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Shortridge deserves all of the credit for making the cheer squad happen, Willis said. “Her ability to see opportunity for meaningful inclusion for all students, where others cannot, is exceptional,” she said.

Shortridge “believes in everyone,” Geri Handberg said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s regular-ed student or the special-ed students. They trust her. Camryn gets to do the things she does because Lorrie believes in it and makes it happen. She’s amazing.”

Shortridge, of Hudson, Wis., said she has been “working and supporting people with different abilities” since 1984. That’s when, right after she graduated from Harding High School, she started working at a group home in St. Paul.

“I loved every minute of it,” she said. “When an opportunity opened at Lake Elmo Elementary in 1996, I was excited to work in the school environment and be able to help students learn, grow and live their best lives. Over the years, I have always tried to foster friendships with general-ed and special-ed students through friendship clubs and activities.”

‘It’s life-changing’

In 2019, Shortridge started the Friendship Club at Oak-Land Middle School, where friends did after-school craft and baking activities using adapted equipment. The specialized equipment helps show general-education students “the amazing things their peers with unique abilities can do,” she said.

Cooper Howe and Orrin Hamilton, both seniors and members of the TRUST Club, joined the adapted cheer squad at a recent practice. When it came time for the “holler-back” cheer, the boys joined in the spelling of P-O-N-I-E-S.

“What does it spell?” the cheer squad team yelled.

“Ponies!” Cooper, Orrin and others responded. “Let’s go, Ponies! Let’s go!”

Adapted cheer squad member Ruby Noah holds a sign supporting the school’s adapted floor hockey team on Tuesday. Behind Ruby are cheer teammates, from left, Camryn Handberg, Alexandra Quandt and Cathleen Costello. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Cooper said he makes a point of saying “Hi” to his friends on the adapted cheer squad and athletic teams in the hallways at school. “It’s been really great getting to know them and hanging out with them,” Cooper said. “It’s life-changing — not only for me, but for them as well — so it’s pretty cool.”

The friendships that have developed between general-education and special-education students at Stillwater “is a win-win for everybody,” Shortridge said.

“Cheer has been a fun, interactive way for the kids to get to know one another,” she said. “I’m always trying to think of ways to get my students involved in the school and in the community. I knew that with my years of experience and all the adaptive technology that we have, that cheer squad would be an awesome way to do that and use all that assistive technology so they can actually do our ‘holler-back’ cheers.

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“They may not be able to verbally say it, but with their recordable buttons, they can call it back, and the gen-ed students are really learning how to interact with them and seeing the cool things they can do with their assisted technologies. It’s been a really fun experience so far this year for everybody involved.”

The cheer squad found out on Thursday that they get to cheer at the Minnesota Special Olympics unified regional basketball tournament in Orono on Jan. 31; a unified team joins general-education and special-education students on the same team.

“That’s our next cheer opportunity,” Shortridge said. “The support and love from the community has been just amazing. We hope to continue to grow the squad, create more adapted cheers, and get to cheer at even more sporting events in the future.”