Up the stairs, past the basketball and volleyball courts and through the wrestling room there is another team carving out practice space in the Hill Center. But they don’t practice shooting, spiking or pinning. No, they’re more of a stunting, tumbling and dancing kind of team. They are the Ithaca College cheerleaders.

But these are not some stereotypical ditzy, blond, “Bring It On,” date-the-quarterback cheerleaders. This is a team that practices three times a week from September to May. This is a team that last spring went to its first competition ever, and won. This is a team with two volunteer coaches and 22 women committed to, yes, cheerleading.

Senior captain Kaylee Collins said the idea of a serious cheerleading team may sound like an oxymoron to some, but definitely not to her.

“We’re working hard to establish ourselves,” she said. “We are not a joke.”

And it’s hard not to take them seriously when they spend all fall practicing and performing for home football games and all winter with the men’s basketball team, only to turn around and train for competitions as soon as basketball season ends.

They are there for more than 20 home games decked out in Bomber blue and gold, pom-poms flashing complete with halftime routines, GO-GO cheers and more school spirit than Nirvana had teen spirit.

They do cartwheels, flips and pyramids. They throw teammates 10 feet in the air and catch them on the way down. They dance, they clap and of course, they cheer. But it hasn’t always been this way.

Assistant Coach Kee Gibson was a freshman five years ago when she and three friends started the cheerleading club. With an adviser’s signature and not much else, it has taken a whole lot of doughnut sales and car washes to transform four freshmen cheerleaders into a program. That’s right, this is a cheerleading program now, and it receives letters from prospective freshmen, just like varsity sports, wanting to know more about the Bomber cheerleaders.

“To see what has evolved here is unbelievable, and I am thrilled to still be a part of it,” Gibson said.

Oddly enough, it was through one of those car washing fundraisers in 2002 that the team landed its volunteer head coach, Dennis Friends.

“I saw a cheerleading fundraiser at Auto Zone,” he said. “I thought it was a high school team so I pulled in to check it out. A few months later, I’m the full-time head coach.”

Sometimes things just work out. Friends was a high school and college cheerleader himself, and he said the future of this no-longer-infant program is bright.

“Every year I’ve been here, things are getting better and better,” he said. “We have more girls and more dedication.”

And he would take offense if anyone called his cheerleaders ditzy.

“These are very intelligent and very athletic girls,” he said. “They come motivated every day I see them, and they are very serious about what they do.”

Sophomore Amanda Bussett juggles her time between cheerleading and club lacrosse but said there is definitely more of a time commitment with cheerleading.

“The level of dedication has to be higher here,” she said. “If you miss a practice, it’s not like someone can hop in and take your place. Everyone has to be out there all the time.”

Bussett also made sure to add that the squad makes cuts, a rarity among club teams. And that’s because for these Bombers, there is a lot more than cheering for the football team. Come springtime, the cheerleaders have their own winning to worry about. All 22 members have high school cheerleading experience and are here looking to compete, not just cheer.

Success is not limited to halftime shows. In the team’s first-ever competition last year at the Cheerleaders of America Open Nationals at Niagara Falls, the women took home first place in the all-female non-tumbling collegiate division. But Friends said the best part about his team is its maturity.

“When I used to coach high school girls, there were problems that I never see here,” he said. “These girls are focused, and they want to be here. And they want to work.”

But even with the competition, the hard work and the cuts, the question is still whether cheerleading is, in fact, a sport.

“Cheerleading at games is a performance,” Collins said. “There’s no question about that. But when it comes to competition, it’s just like any other sport. We are there to win.”

Gibson goes a step further.

“A cheerleader requires a level of athleticism equal to or higher than the varsity football team and basketball team,” she said. “If that doesn’t make us a sport, then I don’t know what does.”

In no other sport, aside from figure skating, do teammates have to trust each other to not only throw, but successfully catch one another as they plummet from dizzying heights. Stunting, the name for all lifts and tosses, is “the hardest thing we do,” Gibson said.

So not surprisingly injuries are a part of the game. Ithaca cheerleaders have suffered broken legs, broken noses and, this year, Bussett partially tore her ACL.

“You have to have physical strength and endurance,” she said. “You have to be physically fit.”

And what about anyone who might quietly smirk or even laugh out loud at the thought of a hard-working cheerleader?

“We do a lot, but nobody gives us credit,” Bussett said. “People don’t seem to understand that we’re more than jumping and cheering. But we’re trying to change the stereotype.”

Collins, a natural blonde turned brunette, even joked about using her dye job to try and dissolve the stereotype. Either way, she’s proven it takes more than blond hair to make a cheerleader.

So whatever people want to think or say, the Ithaca cheerleaders aren’t out to make history, or even revise it. They just love to cheer. And if they happen to change a few minds along the way, so be it.