Get to know Grace Hodder

22/02/2022

Footballer, World Champion Cheerleader, sister. Get to know Grace Hodder.

The Southern Saints’ Grace Hodder has been cheerleading since she was 5 years old, and last year she, along with her team The Kelly Girls, became cheerleading World Champions.

The International Federation of Cheerleading (IFC) oversees the International All-Star Federation (IASF) Worlds event each year in the US, where various cheer teams from around the world compete until one is crowned the World Champion.

“To be honest it still feels weird hearing someone say it to me, it doesn’t really feel like it’s me,” Hodder says.

Worlds was not immune to COVID-19 either, resulting in a revamped format for the 2021 competition, where teams competed via an app, as opposed to the usual in-person competition.

“With all the COVID stuff we couldn’t go in 2020. We and the team and everyone said we’ll commit to going next year. So, we all kept training together, seeing each other 3 times a week, and then we found out they weren’t running an in-person Worlds, they were doing it by an app they were developing,” she says.

“From Tuesday to Tuesday we had to pick a 30-minute period during that week, where you were going to come in and film your routine 4 times. We did 2 runs on the Sunday and then 2 runs on the Tuesday. You had to film in this app, so you couldn’t upload what you had already done, and you had to pick your best run on both of the filming days.”

“On the Sunday when we found out, we all came in really early because the awards were at like 8, so we came in early, and we were all sitting around on this crash mat, just chatting, watching routines, all really nervous.”

The Kelly Girls tapered their expectations, as they faced some highly accomplished opponents, in particular, the American Cheer Sport Great White Sharks team.

“It got to second and first, and the team that we versed had won Worlds like 5 times in that division, and no Australian team had ever won Worlds - they also have a Netflix show about them,” Hodder says.

“Even all of us girls weren’t really expecting anything crazy to happen, ‘cause they have insane skills. So, we were not really expecting much. So, we went in like ‘Oh my god we would be so happy with third, that would be amazing’. We were sitting there waiting for our names to be called in second pretty much, and all of a sudden you hear Cheer Sport Great Whites, and we all went really silent, ‘cause that’s when we realised that we’d won. All of a sudden you just heard this scream and we all started hugging each other and everyone was crying. It was pretty crazy.”

But how does Grace manage to balance her cheerleading and her footy? She says having flexible working hours, and the fact that cheerleading and footy often fall on different days during the week has allowed her to pursue both, but it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

“Oh my god, well at the moment I’m not (laughs). I think I kind of learnt the hard way that you can’t do everything that you want to do. I tried really hard and then I found myself getting calf cramps in the middle of Safeway in the cereal aisle (laughs). I’m really lucky that footy usually falls on a Wednesday-Friday and cheerleading always is a Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday thing. So, I can kind of do that and then I also work in hospitality, so we have an ability to pick our hours, almost. I’m really lucky because if I was working a 9 to 5 job, it wouldn’t really be working,” Hodder explains.

“This year cheerleading's taken precedence. We’re going overseas in early April so from now until then I have to, like, knuckle down because obviously you can’t let your teammates down, so you just have to do what you can do. I was pretty open with Dale at the start of the season and told her what was happening, and she has been really supportive of all my goals and aspirations.”

Grace’s younger brother Lachy Hodder is also training with Sandy, and according to Grace, he’s the better footballer.

“Definitely him, he’s played for so much longer,” she says.

Grace says there are some ways in which cheerleading helps with playing footy.

“Well, for me personally, I’m a base, so I hold people up so you have to be kind of strong for that,” she says.

“I feel like cheerleading is misunderstood . . . like, what cheerleading is, like pom-poms and stuff, which is fair enough because ‘Bring It On’ has absolutely ruined it for everyone. But one thing that cheerleading has helped me out a lot with in footy is mindset, ‘cause some of the training is really hard, and cheerleading is the kind of sport where you have to earn your drink breaks, and if it’s not perfect you just go again until it is. So, in that kind of sense I’ve always been like ‘you have to do it, it’s not going to go away, you don’t want it to be there, you have to get it done’”.

Mindset is an important factor in cheerleading, Grace explains that it played a crucial role in the lead-up to her team recording their winning routine at Worlds.

“On our last day of filming our pyramid was going really badly, like really badly and in our first filming, it fell. Which it hadn’t done in so long so we were all really freaked out,” she says.

“We had one go left to do it and get it perfect.”

“Before we went on my coach came up to us and just said ‘Remember just do exactly what you have to do, nothing more, nothing less, it's fine. I believe in you all, I know you can do it, you just have to not let it come down. In your head right now, you are making a conscious decision that it is not coming down’. They believe that it’s not like ‘what will be will be’, it’s like ‘if you want it, it will happen’. They said ‘just do what you have to do’, and in that run, I think we got to halfway through our routine, my mind was completely blank, and I don’t remember any of it. Then we kind of snapped back in, and all I could think about was the pyramid, and I felt so sick, like I thought I was going to vomit when I was walking there.”

“Every single person that passed me said ‘you’re fine you’ve got it, you’ve done it before you can do it’, and that’s what made me just stop and think we have to do it, because there’s 20 other people on the floor relying on us to do our job, and I think up until then we’d been absolutely perfect. It was insane, like just the energy was crazy, and then we set the pyramid and we were like, we just have to talk the whole time, so for like 45 seconds that we were doing this stunt, we were just non-stop talking, some of it didn’t even have any relevance to what we were doing, we were just saying numbers. We usually do stuff like that so we all knew that we were connected and thinking about it. When we were finished it was like the best thing ever and everyone was going crazy, but I have never thought I was going to vomit so much in my life, because . . . you know when you don’t even realise how scared you are to do something until you finally breathe?”

“How much faith everyone had in each other, and everyone had so much belief that everything was going to be fine, and that we were going to do our job and it was going to be smooth sailing. Even though literally 30 seconds before it had gone so badly. That to me was just crazy, and really made me realise how much a team success is based off literally just trusting each other and having 100% faith in what you’re doing.”

Written by Jye Pierce - Sandringham Football Club Media