They keep winning national titles like Meryl Streep collects acting awards — seven of them in a row with more expected on the way — and yet, in one of those life ironies you just can’t make up, the winningest athletic team right now in the state of Utah, and one of the most dominating in all of college sports, doesn’t have any cheerleaders cheering them on.
For one simple reason: they are the cheerleaders.
Year after year, the cheer teams at Weber State University keep lugging home championship trophies almost as tall as they are. The fact that the trophies are stashed in the coaches office collecting dust ought to give you some idea of the lack of fanfare and fuss. But the bigger fact is that Weber State has won national championships every year since 2017, including two straight Grand Titles — a new award the National Cheerleaders Association implemented in 2023 that recognizes the top school in all of its collegiate divisions. A kind of Best of Show.
Weber State is second to none. The Wildcats are the unknown juggernaut.
Unless you are in the world of competitive cheer, that is, in which case you’re as well known as Patrick Mahomes in football circles.
All this, from a school that didn’t even have competitive cheer until Summer Willis showed up.
Fresh out of college in 1998 with a degree in communications, Summer was hired to a marketing position in the Weber State athletic department. That might have been her career if Weber’s cheer coach hadn’t quit that same year, leaving the Spirit Squad (cheerleading, mascot and dance) in need of a leader.
The department reached out to Summer: “Hey, you cheered in college,” they said (she did, at Utah State University), “would you mind stepping in?”
So that’s how the dynasty began.
Summer quickly discovered two things: 1, she loved coaching a lot more than marketing; 2, she wanted the cheerleaders, who worked as hard at their sport as any other athletes, to be able to show off their skills in competition.
By 2003, she’d developed the cheer program to the point that she dropped marketing and coaching became her full-time job. She started small, taking the squad to competitive meets in the West, until by 2008 Weber State qualified for the first time to compete at nationals, held every April in Daytona Beach, Florida. The newcomer Wildcats placed third. That was surprising, but not nearly as surprising as the next year, when they returned to Daytona and won the whole thing.
Growing pains set in after that, but a lot of hard work and creative fundraising got Summer’s Wildcats back to Daytona for nationals in 2014. They finished third a couple of times and then, in 2017, broke through to claim a title they haven’t relinquished since.
“It seems surreal,” says Summer, “we’re a small school, people don’t know who we are or where we’re from, half of them can’t pronounce our name, and now we go places in the nation and they know who we are and it’s pretty unreal.”
(It should be noted here that collegiate cheerleading has two organizations. One is the National Cheerleaders Association. That’s where Weber State competes. The other is the Universal Cheerleaders Association, which holds its national meet every January in Orlando, Florida. So there are in fact two national groups that crown cheer champions every year. The University of Alabama is the reigning UCA champion in Weber State’s category. Another note: competitions are divided into two categories: All Girls (their terminology, not mine), and Coed. Weber competes in both Large Coed — eight girls, 12 guys — and Small Coed — 16 girls, four guys. Its seven consecutive national titles are in Large Coed.)
As Weber State’s star has risen, as people have learned how to pronounce the name, more and more talented cheer athletes are finding their way to Ogden. In the beginning, the program had almost exclusively local talent, now more than half the roster is from out-of-state, and in many cases out-of-the-country. This year’s team includes athletes from Norway, Australia, Venezuela, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, Hong Kong and the U.K.
And here’s one more statistic that puts Weber State’s emergence as a cheer power into perspective: On the 2025 U.S. National Coed Team, no less than nine members are Weber State products (three alumni and six current athletes) — that’s more than a quarter of the 32-person squad. Alabama, the other national champ, has three.
Trying to make sense of it all, Summer Willis, now in her 26th season as Weber State’s cheer coach, hearkens back to the year she started, in 1998-99, when the Weber basketball team traveled to a first-round March Madness tournament game in Seattle against highly-favored North Carolina and won. She was an eyewitness.
“We were a teeny No. 14 seed and we came in and beat this huge university,” she remembers, “I was there with the cheer team, we were a part of it, it was on my birthday, March 11, and I’m running onto the court celebrating this huge triumph from a university no one would ever imagine winning. I was like, underdogs can do anything. If you work hard enough and believe, you can do it. I honestly think that set a tone for my career, right from year one, because I loved being a part of that. It ignited something that was always in me, I guess, but it was like, yeah, you can be something great if you put in the work and you really believe.”