News : 40 years later, Steve Haefner shares memories of being one of the few guy Vinton cheerleaders

[caption id="attachment_23516" align="alignleft" width="300"] This yearbook page documents Steve Haefner's time as a Vinton cheerleader.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_23966" align="alignright" width="300"] Steve Haefner (Class of '78) shakes hands with VS cheerleader Andrew Wirth during the Homecoming game on Friday. Steve was a basketball cheerleader during his high school years.[/caption] Guys who helped lead high school cheers in Vinton 40 years apart posed together for a photo during Friday's Homecoming game. Steve Haefner attended the game with his peers from the Washington High School Class of 1978. Early in the game he shook hands with Andrew Wirth, one of the few male cheerleaders in Vinton/Vinton-Shellsburg student history. Steve was a football player and track star who made several trips to the State Track Meet. He had wrestled early in his high school year, but thought cheerleading might be a better use of the skills he had acquired in diving/aquatics, and also help him to stay in shape for track season. So he asked to join the cheerleading team, telling the coach he could help set up the girls on pyramids, explaining that with the help of a guy, the cheerleaders could make higher pyramides. "They kind of incorporated me in, and I helped them. I decided to try it between my junior and senior years and it worked out well for them." Steve only joined the basketball cheerleaders, since he was busy with football and track the rest of the school year. He went to the State Track Meet all four years of high school, competing in hurdles and many relay teams. At State, he would run three half-miles and a quarter-mile relay in the same night . He had played football since seventh grade. While in high school, Steve could bench press 300 pounds, so he said that while a few people teased him about being a cheerleader, there was not much of it. One of the highlights of that season 40 years ago was the halftime show that Steve and the other cheerleaders would perform. A favorite routine of that show was when the seven girl cheerleaders would squat down and Steve would dive over them all. "I'd throw them around a lot," Steve recalls, adding that he had watched films from college cheerleading squads. They used mini trampolines and other equipment for their routines. Karolyn Knaack was one of the girls who cheered with Steve. "I remember we did a cheer where Steve would do a leaping somersault over all of us," she recalls.  Susan Meyer attended school thise years and recalls how Steve could do backflips across the gym floor and also hold the girls high up for stunt routines. In August, when Vinton Today published a story mistakenly calling Andrew the first cheerleader in Vinton-Shellsburg school history, several of Steve's friends contacted Steve, as well as us, to tell us Steve's story. [caption id="attachment_23967" align="alignright" width="237"] Jonathan Wandling poses with VS cheerleaders in the fall of 2002; he was possibly the first guy to lead cheers for Vinton-Shellsburg after the two school merged in 1989.[/caption] Steve says he heard that there may have been a cheerleader at Washington High School in the 1960s, but thinks he may be the first cheerleader whose career was documented in the high school yearbook. It turns out that there have been as many as five guys who have helped the cheerleaders over the past half-century of Vinton/Washington High School and Vinton-Shellsburg cheerleading. We spoke to two of them while researching this story. Jonathan Wandling had attended school in Belle Plaine, but joined the V-S cheerleading squad when he moved to Vinton for the 2oo2-03 scool year.