At the bottom of the stands facing the sparse crowd at a losing University of Nevada, Reno football game stood Nevada’s pom, stunt, cheer and mascot teams. Now that the football team was no longer being watched, they were on center stage, and it was time for them to give it their all.
“It’s difficult to want to keep showing up, but it’s never a question of whether you’re going to or not,” Emma Simpson, then-senior cheerleader at UNR, said. “We’re just going to perform to the crowd and do what we like to do, and we just kind of motivate each other.”
According to Kim Anastassatos, head of Nevada Spirit, the poms coach, and the associate athletics director for special events at the University, these losing battles are the most important moments, when her team gets the chance not just to cheer, but to perform.
Anastassatos places her values, as the head of Nevada Spirit, in building a professional team that supports and lifts each other up. According to Emily Beenfeldt, a senior public health major at UNR and fourth-year cheerleader, this structure makes the early practices and long game days all worth it.
“I feel like we’re able to handle things so much better because we are so connected,” Beenfeldt said. “I feel like every experience that we go through honestly just brings us closer together.”
Anastassatos cultivated this current organization focused on community, performance and support throughout the past 20 years, but her time as a member of Nevada Cheer began in 1992 when she was on the cheer team as a poms dancer.
During Anastassatos’ time as a cheerleader in the ‘90s, there were not four separate sections of Nevada Spirit. There were only 20 cheerleaders — 14 women and 6 men for stunting — and one mascot, Wolfie, all under the umbrella of Nevada Cheer.
When she graduated in 1996, Anastassatos began her coaching career as an assistant coach for the cheer team before starting a dance team for the University in 1997.
In 1998, she began selling cheer uniforms for Varsity Spirit Fashions to teams across the United States, which she continued to do for years after.
She served as the head coach of the dance team as well as the assistant cheer coach for four years before she left in 2000 to start the first cheer gym in Nevada, the Cheer Gym, where she coached the team the Monarchs.
In 2002, the Cheer Gym closed down due to high levels of lead in the air from a bad ventilation system in the shooting range next door. Anastassatos continued to sell uniforms and coach at Manogue High School until she was offered the position as head coach of Nevada Cheer at the end of 2006. She began her career as the head coach in 2007.
“I was kind of going to get to finish what I had started in the ‘90s,” Anastassatos said.
Anastassatos had big plans for Nevada Cheer when she came back to coach, one of which was to get rid of coed stunting and create an all-girl poms team based on professional cheer teams —which are strictly poms. Though, Anastassatos quickly realized that was something she couldn’t do because of the number of men who tried out.
Typically, college cheer teams require advanced stunting and tumbling skills, such as a standing back handspring or a standing back tuck. Nevada Spirit does not require this, as they have a poms team, which is similar to a dance team, though they use pompoms and highly stylized dance in order to do their sideline routine.
Cheer, on the other hand, has altogether different routines with less dancing. It is usually characterized by all-girl stunting, but Nevada Cheer did not all-girl stunt until 2018.
Coed stunting consists of boy-girl pairings in order to stunt. Tumbling is individual acrobatics and stunting, usually on a mat, though cheer teams will tumble on the field or basketball court for sideline cheering.
Anastassatos’ most important goal was to transform Nevada Spirit into a professional program with a focus on community and creating a team that worked well together, rather than a strictly talent-based program.
“I’ve learned the very hard way, it doesn’t matter how good you are, if you don’t blend with what we believe in… this isn’t the program for you,” Anastassatos said.
When Anastassatos first came back, the dance and cheer programs were separate. They had completely different practices and coaches, and according to Anastassatos, they did not work well together.
In 2010, the dance team was dissolved due to budget cuts, and Anastassatos absorbed some of the dancers into her cheer program to create full cheer and pom teams.
The current program began taking shape in 2014, when Anastassatos split Nevada Cheer into pom, cheer, tumble and coed stunt. In 2018, Nevada Spirit got rid of tumbling and absorbed the stunters into cheer, and the resulting program is what remains today.
Anastassatos has always wanted her family to be invested in cheer in the same way that she was. Once she began coaching again, she brought her young daughters to practices, tryouts, games and more.
Whitney Welker, her daughter and junior on the cheer team at Nevada, has seen the development of Nevada Spirit firsthand.
“I think the skill level has definitely increased,” Welker said. “Cheer didn’t start stunting until a couple years ago, so that is something that has changed completely in our program. Now we look for bases and back spots and flyers, so that completely changed cheer. Stunt used to never dance… now, we look for performers that can also do coed stunting. It’s constantly evolving with the times.”
Nevada Spirit has a large presence not only at the University of Nevada, Reno, but in the broader Reno community as well. Its four different teams are at almost every athletic event throughout the year, and they have over 5,800 volunteer hours in the 2025-2026 year alone —more than any other athletic program at UNR.
Nevada Spirit visits schools, raises donations for the Food Bank of Northern Nevada and makes public appearances, working as ambassadors for the University in a way that is much more hands-on and rigorous than it was before Anastassatos’ time.
Even with all that Nevada Spirit does for the community and the University of Nevada, it is still only partially funded by the University’s athletic department.
Members of the cheer, pom and stunt teams must all pay a $500 “spirit pack” every year that they make the team in order to pay for their uniforms, practice, travel and other game-day necessities.
On top of this fee, they hold multiple fundraisers and youth camps for younger cheerleaders and dancers to get more money for their program.
Members of Nevada Spirit are also not eligible for regulated NIL deals despite the number of appearances that they make in the community, though Anastassatos hopes to see a future where her cheerleaders can profit from the hard work that they do in the same way that traditional athletes do.
“I would really love it if we didn’t have to pay anything,” Anastassatos said. “If they got the privileges of athletes…that they got all of that without having to pay anything, that would be my ultimate goal.”
Many of the athletes feel the same way, including Welker, who wishes that she could see a day when cheerleaders for UNR didn’t have to pay. Though, she also understands that the fee is necessary for them to be able to have some of the experiences that they do, such as going to cheer camps, travelling to cheer and more.
“We don’t get a lot of funding at all, and I know a lot of girls who have had to stop cheering because of financial situations,” Welker said. “But it’s also difficult because much is given, much is expected.”
There are multiple possible reasons for this separation of Nevada Spirit from some of the benefits that other student-athletes enjoy. One explanation is that Nevada Cheer is non-competitive, so it is strictly a sideline cheer group. Sideline cheering is not an NCAA-sanctioned sport, meaning that any sideline-cheer team would not be eligible for the benefits of other competitive sports.
Anastassatos believes that another possibility is that the University and the surrounding community have gotten used to Nevada Spirit volunteering their time for little to no benefits.
“What’s happened is we’ve always done this, so it’s very hard to switch when you do that for free to then ask to be paid,” Anastassatos said.
Even if the current Nevada cheerleaders might not see a time when they get regulated NIL deals or don’t have to pay the spirit pack, Anastassatos has high hopes for the future, and a strong belief that Hayley Canfield, the current cheer coach for UNR, will be able to bring about the changes that Anastassatos might not be able to right now.
Canfield was a cheerleader for Nevada on the poms team from 2014-2017, and began coaching cheer in 2019 when the former cheer coach left and Anastassatos offered her the position.
“Hayley Canfield has been with me for a long time,” Anastassatos said. “I hope that when I leave she’ll be able to take over.”
Of the future of Nevada Spirit, Canfield stated that she’d like to see more donations come back to the program directly to be used for scholarships, uniforms and training camps.
“I think there’s a difference between doing community service and being at community events,” Canfield said. “Obviously we would never charge an elementary school to show up at reading weeks, that’s crazy. But if we are at the amazing Big Brothers, Big Sisters Gala that they throw every year, which is such a fun event, but, I mean, our girls are on their feet selling raffle tickets for six hours, and we’re lucky if they get dinner out of it. That event could probably donate some money to the program.”
Canfield also claimed that the donations that get made to the University when Nevada Spirit makes public appearances do not come back to the cheer program, and she’d like to see a cut of the donations for those events specifically.
Nevada Spirit has a long way to go to get the same benefits as student-athletes in other programs, though it has gotten better in the time since Canfield cheered at the University.
“In the previous years we’ve started getting more recognition from the athletic department, which is really nice,” Canfield said.
Many of the cheerleaders, including Beenfeldt, do not believe that the recognition would change their experience cheering for Nevada, and that’s not why they do what they do.
“We do a lot, but I think that everything that we do is so good and so beneficial for the community, so I don’t need to prove anything to anybody,” Beenfeldt said. “I know that what I’m doing is fulfilling my life and I know that it’s important to me.”
Since 2007, Anastassatos has coached over 800 students, and her program has created a lasting impact on many of them, including Simpson, who will be graduating this year.
“If there’s anything that I would wish to see leaving and graduating, it’s that I would want my team to get the respect that they deserve and to be held in high regard by everybody,” Simpson said.
For Anastassatos, it is important that her athletes feel supported even after college, and she stays in contact with many of them past graduation.
“I feel like this will always be your team,” Anastassatos said. “If they ever need us when they’re older, whether they have cancer, whether they’re going through something, they can always come back to where they came from. It’s super important for me as a coach for them to always remember that I believe in them. Ultimately, they also believe in me…the least I can do is be true to them and be there for them if they ever need me when they’re gone.”
Anastassatos’ career as the head coach is winding down, but her passion for the sport and her athletes remains, and the changes that she’s made to the program, both in its values and structure, will prevail even after she leaves.
“We love to say that Nevada Cheer always wins,” Anastassatos said. “We don’t cheer necessarily for teams to win, we cheer for a university that we want to bring spirit to.”
