'Cheer' Coach Vontae Johnson is Above the Drama
If you're at all familiar with Netflix's Sports Cinematic Universe—that is, director Greg Whiteley's trio of sports documentary series, Last Chance U, Last Chance U: Basketball, and Cheer—you know that one truth has governed these releases so far. That is: The head coach will always, always have a meltdown. Or two. Or three. (Never forget when Buddy Stephens karate-kicked a camera.)
At least until now. The NSCU changed forever last week, thanks to its newest coach, Trinity Valley Community College's Vontae Johnson. Introduced in Season Two of Cheer, over the course of the nine new episodes, he—rather remarkably considering the pandemic foiled his 2020 campaign—breaks the streak of memeable tirades. Sure, the man is stern. Sometimes even a little scary. He'll make you run suicides if you don't smile during a routine. But at no point does Johnson make like Jason Brown and try to break Netflix's f-bomb record.
When I Zoomed with Johnson following the show's debut, I asked him if he had taken note of Last Chance U's red-faced misadventures, and made sure the cameras didn't catch any meltdowns. "I'm way aware of everything I do," Johnson said. "No, I didn't think that. I was just trying to be the best coach that I could be for the kids during any time, no matter who was around."
Over the course of our conversation, it becomes clear that that's Johnson, at his core. Frank, fair, above the drama. During Cheer's entire runtime, he doesn't have one mean word to spare for his rivals over at Navarro College. When asked about Navarro coach Monica Aldama, he merely said that he didn't know her that well—even though the two colleges are such fierce competitors that, in Daytona's NCA College Nationals, they're often the only two teams pitted against each other. When I joked that the moral of Cheer was never to go on Dancing with the Stars, he kept a straight face and offered a few gracious words about Navarro's team. Instead, he preferred to talk about masculinity in cheer, watching his competition's best (and worst) moments, and what he sees when he looks at that big ball of tape.
That conversation has been edited for clarity and length, below.
Esquire: The one thing that I keep coming back to with your coaching in Cheer is how you work with Dee. Sometimes, you give him tough love. In other moments, you have this arm-around-your-shoulder disposition with him. In the heat of the moment, how do you know to comfort someone or be tough with them?
Vontae Johnson: You can see it in their body language. You watch him and you've been around him throughout the whole year, so you know how he's going to respond to certain things. But in the toughest times, there's no way you should be being tough on an athlete. You should try to comfort him. Make him feel like he doesn't have to be afraid to be in certain situations. I just want him to feel like he can always come to me in his toughest moments. And yeah, I'm going to be hard on him sometimes because I want the best for him. But I'm also going to make sure that he knows that he always has me.
Esquire: What's the biggest thing in establishing that trust?
V.J.: If they don't trust you, then they'll never see your vision of what could happen for them. They're all young kids. They're trying to find their place in the world and how they're going to move forward. So my goal is to help them realize that I'm going to help guide them the way I think that they want to be guided. I'm going to try to push them in the path where they can be successful, where they can get to the next school, where they can graduate, and be successful in life. I try to make sure they understand it's not all about cheer. I'm going to help you with life.
Esquire: You really do blend the life lessons well with the stakes at hand, which is winning and losing. I think you see that in the tape ball, which becomes this totem of the pressure you're under. What does your team see when they look at that ball?
V.J.: They see everyone that's been through the program. They see the ones that were on the team the previous year. If you don't win, then you keep that same tape ball and we don't retire it. So you get to take all of those people who didn't have that opportunity to win on the mat with you to give them that sense of resolve—because they weren't able to do it while they were here. So we get to look at the tape ball and we're just in awe. We're like, "Hey, these people are still here with us."
Esquire: We talked a little bit about Dee, but I want to move on to the rest of the Weenies, which is such a great term. The way masculinity was brought up in Cheer this season was especially interesting. What does it mean to be a man in cheer today?
V.J.: Well, first and foremost, as coaches, we try to make sure that no matter what, you are always going to be welcome at the program. It does not matter what you are or who you love. We just want you to be yourself. So, of course, with the Weenies, they come from that tough background where they weren't used to those types of environments. I think that people just had this opinion about the sport. So making them feel comfortable and showing them by example that it's not what people may portray it as—and just making them feel like they can do it as well. My goal was to guide the Weenies to realize that, hey, I can do all the things that you're afraid to do because you think that people are going to perceive you differently. And that’s not the case. No matter who you are, no matter what you are, we love you for who you are.
Esquire: You tell one of the male cheerleaders, "You shouldn't be worrying about coming off as gay, or seeming any kind of way. You're performing and you're being your best self."
V.J.: Yeah. I built relationships with everybody that I had on the team, Jeron, which he's a gay male and that's totally fine. I love Jeron. And then, you go to the other side where it's Dee and he's super straight, and I'm like, "Hey, doesn't matter to me. I don't care about your preference. All I care about is you being comfortable in your shoes. And I'm going to show you by example that you're not going to be perceived that way if I'm doing it. And if you think that I'm this big, masculine man, I will still go out there before because I don't care what nobody else thinks about me. I do care about making you guys feel comfortable. But if I can do it, you can do it."
Esquire: Speaking of that, how much time do you have to spend in the gym to be able to do the stunt where you hold someone's shoe with one hand and flip them up?
V.J.: I would say it took some time. When I first got into cheer, I wasn't a great co-ed stunter. It took maybe a couple years to get used to those skills, starting off with the basics, building up progressions. But finally getting to that point where you're understanding the stunt and building that muscle mass in those certain spots where you can hold those stunts. So it took a couple years, and then I started to figure it out. And then, of course, all the years after it—just riding a bicycle.
Esquire: This is unique to the coaches featured on Cheer, often even compared to pro sports, but you get to watch yourself, your team, and your rival, all documented in a Netflix show. Can you just talk about the experience of sitting down, queuing up Cheer, and what you're thinking while you're going through the episodes?
V.J.: It is a surreal moment, because you get to go through that process. You're like, Uh-oh, here they come. Here this goes. I think at the end of the day, the countless hours we put in filming, they did their best. They did a great job on partaking in a rivalry because that's what we were going into this as. And showing the intensity on how it's going to be, and how great both programs are. Because we might be 37 miles apart, but we are two of the best teams in the country. So being able to show both sides, showing how hard the kids have to work, what they have to go through, I think that they did a really good job.
Esquire: What did you feel watching all the Navarro moments?
V.J.: So I cheered on an all-star team last year and I cheered with quite a few athletes that were on the Navarro team. And to be able to watch them have to go through the same things we go through, you invest in them too. You get to understand their pain. So I have a tremendous amount of respect for all of them on that team, and the coaches as well. So it was neat to be able to watch another team. Because you're so used to yourself. And to be able to watch them like, Oh, that's crazy. They're going through the same thing. Nobody's alone in this.
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