This story originally published online at The Assembly.
Reynolds Coliseum was packed to the gills when the North Carolina State University Dance Team took the court on a February night. A wolf howl blasted through the loudspeaker, and then the dancers came to life with the bass notes of “Million Dollar Baby,” moving in perfect sync to the lyrics.
“Do it, baby, do what I should think / Do it, do it, baby, do what I could think.”
Clad in the staple of sports entertainment—black leggings, sparkly midriff-baring sports bras, and bright red lipstick—they took a final leap and finished in a half-split.
One dancer stood out: Ryan Cawley, a first-year on the 36-member dance team. He had the same smooth moves, but wore black pants and a black-and-red stylized T-shirt with the word “PACK.” Cawley is the first male dancer in the team’s 30-year history and one of only a handful in the country performing with this kind of dance team.
Cawley had no trepidation about joining the all-female group. “I was always kinda surrounded by girls,” he said. “I was used to being the only guy in the studio, so I don’t really care about being the odd man out.”
The Cary native has been dancing since the first grade, when he’d follow along in the back of his older sister’s dance classes. He has studied jazz and hip hop, ballet and contemporary. He danced competitively with L.A. Dance, a studio in Morrisville, and was the captain of the Green Hope High School Dance Team in Cary.
“I was used to being the only guy in the studio.” Ryan Cawley, N.C. State dancer
Things began to change seven years ago when the Los Angeles Rams added men to its cheerleading squad. (In pro sports, cheerleading is more akin to collegiate dance teams, performing longer routines to music.) Mina Ortega, owner of Pro Action Dance, which provides coaching and choreography to collegiate, NBA, and NFL dance teams, remembers that as a turning point. She’s also the coach of the University of Southern California’s team, the USC Trojan Dance Force, which added its first male dancer two years ago. “It was time,” she said.
Ortega noted that some teams, both at the pro and collegiate level, are unlikely to follow suit. “Some of them have a brand, and that’s what it is,” she said. “The Los Angeles Laker Girls, it’s right there in the name.”
Nor are you likely to see guys in the lineup of the Las Vegas Raiderettes, which call themselves “Football’s Fabulous Females.” Similarly, UNC-Chapel Hill’s squad is called the Carolina Girls. (The group had its first male dancers years ago when it went by a different name.)
Today, only a handful of schools with dominant athletic programs—those in the so-called power conferences—have male dancers. Among the 68 schools in the ACC, SEC, Big Ten, and Big 12, only seven include a male dancer on their current rosters. Among them are Minnesota, Iowa State, and Kentucky, the latter of which has two male dancers this year. There are also smaller schools with male dancers, such as Hofstra University on Long Island, which has several men on its 27-person team.
Dancing Shoes
Some schools offer scholarships to prospective dance team members. Amanda Roediger, coach of N.C. State’s dance team for 17 years, can’t do that, but she’s still out there recruiting.
“We send people to a combine in Ohio every year,” she said. (That’s right, a combine for dancers, just like in football, but in this case, it’s a chance for high school dancers to strut their stuff for prospective colleges.) She can offer little more than Adidas gear, but she attracts dancers from out of state who want to be part of N.C. State’s program.
N.C. State and other schools also hold dance clinics each year on their campuses for local and out-of-town high school dancers, an opportunity for dancers to get to know a school’s program and for the coaches to get to know them. That’s where she came across Ryan Cawley. “We were keeping an eye on him,” she said.
The decision to put him on the team wasn’t hard. He’s a versatile dancer, Roediger said, who has a presence on the floor and executes complex routines cleanly. “Ryan can translate to all genres,” she said. He was also a terrific student—he’s studying civil engineering in college—well-rounded, with supportive parents.
“The dynamic has been great,” said Alaina Isaak of Cary, who dances on the team. “He’s getting every moment he deserves.”
Roediger and Cawley both knew there would be some challenges. Costuming, for one. “Obviously I’m not going to wear a sports bra,” Cawley said. They ended up with black pants and branded shirts that were compatible with the different looks of the women’s uniforms. And Roediger didn’t know if Cawley would be comfortable dancing with pom-poms, so she gave him the option. He had used them in high school, so he was fine with it.
“We kind of thought it was going to be a trial-and-error year,” Roediger said. “But it hasn’t been. Everything we tried has worked.”
Cawley is not the first male dancer on a collegiate team in North Carolina. Caedmon Akers of Sylva is part of the UNC-Greensboro squad, and Western Carolina University currently has a male dancer. At Elon University, Cullen Zeno danced with the team in 2021-22, his senior year. Zeno, of Lafayette, Louisiana, said he was concerned about negative reactions at first. “Like people are going to think, ‘A guy on the dance team?’”
But that reaction never came. “And then I was going out there being confident, saying, ‘I’m going to show you why I am on the dance team.’”
Roediger knew there might be negative reactions to Cawley. In her day job, she’s a special education teacher, and she’s protective of all her dancers. “We do well checks on everyone,” she said. With Cawley, “we were making sure his rooming situation was good, things like that,” she said.
She was also aware that another barrier had already been broken at N.C. State. Robbie Leske, a senior from Pawling, New York., has been a featured twirler for the Wolfpack for four years, the first man in that role at the school. Leske only considered schools with good twirling programs, and also tried out to twirl at the University of Georgia and Tulane University before deciding on N.C. State.
“I was very worried about it at first, going to a school in the south,” he said. “But I have had no problems. It’s a warm environment. And I am able to stand out a little more—and that’s fun sometimes.”
On a hot day last August, the first football game in Carter-Finley Stadium marked the public debut of this year’s dance team. Roediger remembers the Walk of Champions, when the dancers parade by fans who gather to welcome the football players. She said she scanned the crowd, watching for signs of anyone who wasn’t welcoming of Cawley.
During the halftime show, “we put him near one of us,” she said, so that the coaches could keep an eye out. She kept watching the crowd. But it was just a typical day in the stands. “We have not had any problems,” she said. “I’ve had more people say not-nice things to our African-American girls.”
Did she feel like they were making history?
“History? Well, I feel like we are making progress,” Roediger said. “But yeah, it is history.”
On the night of Cawley’s performance in Reynolds last month, the team got more than just the usual crowd. It was ESPN College Game Day, which meant the network’s anchors broadcast live from the arena and put a focus on the spirit aspect of the game.
After the game, a knot of fans just outside the court waited for members of the Wolfpack women’s basketball team to emerge. A few approached Cawley, who was still in his uniform. “You guys are great,” one woman said. Cawley says he’s open to continuing to pursue dance after college, but he’ll have to see where his career takes him. For now, he’s a fan favorite at N.C. State.
As he left the building, with pom-poms attached to his team-issued Adidas backpack, a woman yelled out, “Hey, we loved seeing a guy dance!”
Correction: A previous version of this story said UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Girls dance team had never had a male dancer. The group had male dancers when it went by a different name.
To comment on this story email arts@indyweek.com.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.