Aly and Andrea | Texas Cheer & Pom

Aly Calvo and Andrea Kulberg

Say hello to the owners of the biggest cheer competition company in Great Britain. Twin sisters Aly and Andrea shared the UT sidelines in 1993 and ’94, and remain the only cheerleading twins in Texas history. It all started with an insult in the junior high lunchroom.

Andrea is mostly blind, with no sight in one eye and very limited sight in the other, and might be the only handicapped person to have participated in major college cheerleading. In true twin fashion, they tell the origin story together, finishing each other’s thoughts. Aly recalls “We were in the lunch room talking about cheerleader tryouts when this group of mean girls told Andrea ‘You can’t try out, Blindy.” Andrea finishes the insult “You can’t even see the chalk board from the first row.” It was mean, but it was also motivating. The sisters made that first squad, and every squad after that. In fact, Andrea was so motivated she was a high school All American, despite her lack of vision. Tenacity, meet talent.

Andrea recalls the first time her lack of vision became a problem at UT. It was her very first mens’s basketball game, and she was in a liberty heel stretch as the players were being introduced. “Suddenly the lights were turned off and it was pitch black in the Erwin Center and I lost my bearings, and I was thinking Why didn’t somebody tell me they were going to turn off the lights?” Andrea fought to keep in the stunt while secretly freaking out and trying not to fall. The team introduction seemed to take forever, but she made it. “I am mostly blind, but I still used sight to keep my balance” Andrea recalls. “After that experience I became a better stunter real quick.” It was yet another challenge to conquer.

Ross Dickey, one of Andrea’s squad members and probably the greatest tumbler in UT cheer history, once suggested in practice that if she could tumble blind, so could he, and pulled his t-shirt over his head and immediately crashed a tumbling pass. “Ross said: OK it’s really hard, I don’t know how you do it” Andrea says with a sad smile, adding that Ross passed away two years ago.

One of the few contributions to Texas Cheer tradition from the 1990’s came from Aly. “There were cheerleaders at other schools doing push-ups after scoring” Aly recalls, “and I thought that we could take it up a notch because everyone on the squad could do backs.” Cheer coach Billy Pope loved the idea, and thus was born the end zone tradition of lining up and throwing a back flip for every Texas point on the scoreboard.

In 1995 Andrea was in her senior year and student teaching requirements did not allow her time to cheer. Aly stayed on and was part of the squad that earned a spot in the national cheer championship. Texas Cheer had not been competing for years and were an unknown coming in. “We didn’t have a clue if we were good” Aly says. Upon qualifying Coach Pope asked the squad their opinion of how high they would finish. No one thought they could win it, and weren’t even sure about top five, but Billy knew better and said they were one of the best. They won second place.

Fast forward to 1998, the twins had finished UT and went their separate ways in life. Andrea was working in education and occasionally teaching cheer coach conferences around the states when she gets a call from England with a request to write an article for the brand new British Cheerleading Association. At the time there was no cheerleading in Britain. “It was like stepping back to 1984” Andrea says. Aly chimes in “At that time it was the birthday DJ sound system with fold out mats.” Andrea follows the thought “It was very scattered and elementary grass roots cheerleading.” It was the beginning of an American idea in a country that shuns American culture.

In 2000 Andrea was invited to teach a stunt clinic in Britain just after giving birth to her daughter. “I normally would have said no to that offer, but while I was pregnant I found out I had kidney cancer and I didn’t know if I was going to live, and England was on my bucket list, so I said Sure, I’ll do it.” I am a bit stunned at this revelation, but Andrea keeps talking. “It was an opportunity to contribute to the sport that had fed not just myself but my sister and I and the relationship we had as twins.” That first trip to England included teaching them Hook ‘Em Horns and Texas Fight and all the Longhorn culture, which they loved. It was a kind of spirit that did not exist across the pond.

Over the next decade it evolved from grass roots to team competitions, with Andrea bringing the top Americans over once a year to teach in a big camp competition. “I learned the trade and how to make events, and started a company over there.” One of those years Andrea was pregnant so Aly stepped in to run the event and everyone thought she was Andrea. From there a British company was formed with a British partner which lasted a few years, but didn’t work out, and Andrea thought the dream was over.

At that point the twins created a women’s leadership consultancy company here in Texas and were busy building that idea when the Brits came calling again. It was 2013 when they decided to form Legacy Cheer and Dance, and the next year hosted their first competition. “We had 33 teams at our first event. This season we will have 20,000 athletes at our events” Aly reports. “Legacy never was about building pyramids, it was how do we build these kids as leaders? How do we build them up and teach them everything that we got out of cheering a Texas?” The Legacy motto became Building Leaders for Life.

On the other side of life, Aly and Andrea have two children each. Aly has one graduate from UT and one senior at UT. Andrea has one graduate of Georgia who was also a cheerleader, and the other is a senior at Georgia. This twin thing seems to go on and on through the years.

“Andrea and I have always elevated each other; one would accomplish a stunt and then the other would learn something else, and we would keep building each other up” Aly explains. “Looking back, we make a living helping thousands of people, we’ve grown this sport unbelievably, and all because one girl said You Can’t.”

Legacy is all the twins do these days,. “It’s more than a 9 to 5 job, we put in a lot of hours” admits Andrea. They live in Texas and have an office in England. It’s a cyclical business, so they employ a small staff at the office. They use massive concert arenas like Olympic Park in London, with a staff of 70 people for events, which does not include security, medical or arena staff. They have multiple competition floors running simultaneously. Before Covid they had nine events per year. They have pared it down to four events in much larger spaces. Their upcoming March competition will have 700 teams participating. They have big trucks load in on a Friday with spring floors, sound equipment, merchandise, backdrops, etc. Their call time is six in the morning on Saturday and they go til 11pm, then turn around and do it again on Sunday, loading up the trucks and returning gear to the warehouse at midnight.

Andrea sums it up this way: “The journey for us has been as much about the business and community as it has been about sisterhood. And all the tenacity that you learn cheerleading at the collegiate level you can incorporate into the business world in successful ways that impact a lot of people. For us the foundation for that came at UT.”