Practitioner
Lawrence Herkie Herkimer
Legend of Dance
Why They Matter
Herkimer matters to dance and movement history because cheer sits at the intersection of athletics, choreographed spectacle, rhythmic unison and audience leadership. His camps turned locally learned routines into a national pedagogy: instructors could teach shared shapes, timing, jumps, stunts and…
Known For
Biography
Lawrence Russell Herkimer was born on 14 October 1925 in Muskegon, Michigan, and moved with his family to Dallas as a child. He cheered at North Dallas High School, then became head cheerleader and a gymnast at Southern Methodist University, completing his bachelor's degree in 1948. These collegiate experiences placed him inside a form that was becoming increasingly athletic and visually sophisticated after the Second World War.
Herkimer organized an early national-model cheerleading clinic at Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville, Texas. Authoritative sources differ on whether the first camp occurred in 1948 or 1949 and on initial attendance figures, though they agree that subsequent sessions drew substantially larger groups. The International Cheer Union and USA Cheer mark this work as a turning point when cheerleading needed standardized education and portable pedagogy.
The National Cheerleaders Association, which Herkimer founded and had incorporated by 1961, distributed movement vocabulary through camps and instructors: jumps, basic partner stunts, tumbling, crowd-leading techniques and choreographed cheers. Herkimer created the "Herkie," a signature jump with one leg extended and the other bent. Its asymmetrical line and emphatic arm placement made it readable at stadium scale and reproducible across teams.
Herkimer's enterprise expanded beyond instruction into equipment and uniform design. His wife Dorothy founded the Cheerleader Supply Company in 1951 and designed uniforms, while Herkimer developed a handled pom-pon documented in U.S. patent 3,560,313, filed in 1968 and granted in 1971. The company's manufacturing, publications and camp system helped align equipment, image and technique across the growing cheer landscape.
By 1961, the International Cheer Union reports the NCA system was training more than 100,000 athletes annually. Herkimer sold the business in 1986. Institutions frequently call him the "father" or "grandfather" of modern cheerleading, though cheerleading itself predates his work and developed through many athletes, coaches, women educators, schools and organizers. His strongest defensible legacy is infrastructural: he made cheer technique portable through camps, trained instructors, standardized visual devices and created repeatable movement vocabulary that circulated nationally.
Herkimer died on 1 July 2015 in Dallas at age 89.
Legacy & Impact
Herkimer matters because he helped turn U.S. cheerleading from locally learned practices into a teachable, nationally distributed movement system. His camps created a shared pedagogical vocabulary—specific jumps, stunts, motions and transitions—that schools could adapt for their own performances. The resulting infrastructure affected how cheer bodies trained, how technique was learned and transmitted, and how performance circulated across the country. His work should be credited alongside Dorothy Herkimer and the many athletes and educators whose labor sustained the system.
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