Look Back – Get Excited!

Baylor fans have long been known for their great passion in rooting for the Baylor Bears. Whether it’s cheering on those competing in football, basketball, acrobatics and tumbling, or any other of Baylor University’s 19 intercollegiate varsity sports, the Baylor Family always rallies around the young men and women representing the University against other schools.

The most prominent embodiment of this school spirit over the years has been the members of the Baylor Spirit program. Today, that program comprises three teams of its own, with many moving parts. The Cheer team includes the All-Girl and Coed Yell Leaders. Alongside them on the sidelines can be found the Baylor Songleader Dance Team and the ever-popular Bruiser and Marigold mascots.

Back in 1920, when the story of generating excitement among Baylor fans begins, things were much simpler.

Baylor’s first yell leaders were exclusively male. Tom Cheavens was among those early champions of the Baylor Bears. An El Paso native, he served as chief yell leader for three years, from 1922 to 1924, while majoring in chemistry and physics. Before the final game of the 1923 football season — a road contest against SMU — one newspaper reported on the prospects of the Baylor presence in the stands: “According to Tom Cheavens, the famous yell leader who has perfected an organization for yelling . . . all of these rooters will be on hand 100 per cent strong for the Thanksgiving game.”

In the fall of 1922, Cheavens shared the sidelines with Baylor’s first female yell leader, a sophomore named Weta Timmons. School spirit increasingly grew as the football season progressed, with the Bears going undefeated in conference play to win the team’s first Southwest Conference championship.

The following January, the student body re-elected Timmons and Cheavens for the following year. However, in March 1923 the Lariat shared the news that Timmons would be leaving Baylor to become a schoolteacher in nearby Itasca: “As a member of a duet of yell leaders that carried the responsibility, and with honors, of a student body through its greatest football year, and also through a basketball season upon unanimous re-election, the girl with the encouraging yell, the shrill whistle and the happy smile — this is how ‘Tim’ will be remembered by her fellow students.”

Baylor’s yell leaders would remain a male-only organization until the fall of 1968. The change followed much debate about the topic throughout the 1960s — a debate that Timmons weighed in on when contacted by the Lariat in March 1967. Now known as “Mrs. Orville Rowland,” she shared fond memories of cheering on the Bears and said, “I think it would be a good thing for Baylor to have coed yell leaders. It’s not really unladylike as some people think.”

On April 25, 1967, a few days after an election during Diadeloso had been declared void, the student body voted 1,194 to 996 to approve the establishment of a yell leader team consisting of both men and women. Because the 1967-68 yell leaders had already been elected, it wasn’t until football season began in 1968 that Baylor’s three male and three female yell leaders established a new tradition of shared school spirit.

A few more changes would follow in the ensuing decades. The All-Girl Yell Leaders team, for instance, was created in 2004. And the Baylor Spirit program’s presence has expanded to include performances at all football games, basketball games and home volleyball games, with team members also traveling to postseason football championships and bowl games.

Through the years, however, the core mission of the Baylor Spirit program has remained the same — to create a game-day atmosphere filled with excitement, passion and school spirit as the Baylor Family cheers the Bears on to victory.