From Woodbury, Cheering On The NFL Champs

Woodbury native Ciara Wohlford used to get a little nervous before hitting the sidelines to cheer on her classmates at and .

But the 19-year-old says she’s calmer these days, even though she is now cheering on the gridiron exploits of the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field.

“Well, unless I know someone who’s there,” Wohlford said.

Wohlford is a member of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay cheerleading squad, which also makes her a Packers cheerleader. (The NFL team uses cheerleaders from UW-Green Bay and St. Norbert College.)

Wohlford attended Woodbury for her first two years of high school and finished up at East Ridge, where she was a sideline cheerleader for basketball and football games.

The day after her senior prom, Wohlford headed to UW-Green Bay to try out for cheerleading, which she thought would be something fun to do and help her meet people at college. They cheer at Packers home games and for the men’s and women’s basketball teams at UW-Green Bay. It’s time consuming, Wohlford said.

“It’s been crazy,” she said Monday from Woodbury, where she has been for a week and a half before heading back to Green Bay on Thursday.

With family from Wisconsin, Wohlford said she is more of a Packers fan than a Vikings fan, and when the green and gold take the field for starting lineups, “it’s breathtaking.”

“I just love it,” she said. “I like being part of that tradition—being part of an American pastime.”

The cheer squad practices twice a week for about three hours a time, Wohlford said, and they work on “stunting” and dance routines and building human pyramids.

While the Packers may feel some added pressure for this weekend’s playoff tilt, Wohlford said she’s merely looking forward to “the intensity of the game.” There were plenty of blowouts at Lambeau Field this year as the Packers steamrolled the league en route to a 15-1 regular-season record, and she said she is looking forward to a competitive game.

“Mainly just getting the crowd pumped up—to get them into the game,” she said.

Television crews don’t show Packers cheerleaders too often, Wohlford said. “They see a lot of our legs maybe.”

But she did get a little TV time earlier this year on E! Entertainment Television and NBC’s Today show. “We met Matt Lauer and Al Roker,” she said.

“We get to have this cool experience with the team,” Wohlford said. “There’s just so many fun parts of the game.”

She said she enjoys watching sports in general.

"I’m not some prissy cheerleader,” said Wohlford, a communications major at UW-Green Bay. “We’re not all girly-girl type people.”

Wohlford said she hasn’t been nervous about cheerleading since a Packers offense-defense scrimmage before the season began. But she does worry about holding up large flags on windy days during introductions: “And losing it and maybe knocking out a player.”