Championship Cheer

In their first year back on the competition mat since 2016, the Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Owls’ cheerleaders swooped in to win the Intermediate Small Coed Division at the 2023 National Cheerleaders Association (NCA) College National Championship in Daytona Beach last April. This title came just days after the FAU men’s basketball team’s devastating one-point loss in the Final Four.

Head cheer coach Hector Escamilla and his staff of assistant coaches knew exactly what it would take to land on top. Escamilla cheered during his four years as an undergrad at FAU, winning a partner stunting title (when one athlete lifts and tosses another above their head) while he was there. After graduation, he coached two high schools to state titles, as well as all-star teams. He returned to his alma mater as FAU’s head cheer coach in 2021, making it his mission to reclaim the national trophy won twice before in 1999 and 2016.

If you had known Escamilla, now 33, as a teen at Park Vista High School in Lake Worth, you never would have predicted he’d become so accomplished on the cheer circuit.

He was a three-sport athlete — football, wrestling and track and field. After a career-ending ACL injury derailed his plans to play college football, he saw a girl at his high school tumbling, an acrobatic exercise which involves back handsprings and flips. Impressed by her talent, he asked who taught her to do that, and she referred him to a local cheer gym owned by FAU’s coach at the time.

Escamilla became a gym rat the summer leading into his freshman year at FAU and relied on YouTube videos to learn tumbling and stunting techniques. He’s since helped other football players transition from the field to the sidelines for various reasons, such as a football player who lost his scholarship when his college pulled the football program during COVID-19.

“That opportunity opened my door up to a new family and a new set of opportunities and experiences that I never thought I would have had,” the Pompano Beach resident says of trying cheerleading for the first time. “That brought me into wanting to continue to do cheer.”

As a recruitment tactic to build a larger and higher-caliber team with more advanced pyramids and basket tosses, he lures athletes from across the country to the Boca Raton campus by reiterating, “We’re 1.8 miles from the beach and we’re winning in paradise.” This year, the spirit squad has 37 members, but only a select 19 were put on the mat to compete at Nationals.

In addition to FAU, he continues to teach private lessons and coach teams at Cheer Florida All-Stars, a cheerleading gym in Coconut Creek.