Cheering herself to success

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, February 4, 2006

When Sea Gal DeAnna Raihl visited Stanwood High School in October, she didn’t wear the dance team’s short-shorts.

“That wouldn’t fit our dress code,” joked Christine Gruver, an assistant principal at the school. “She wore a sweats outfit.”

Michael V. Martina / The Herald Third-year Seattle Seahawks Sea Gal DeAnna Raihl practices with the team at Bally Total Fitness in Bellevue before heading to the Super Bowl.

Raihl, a 1996 graduate of Stanwood High, returned to the school Oct. 4 with Seahawks players Kelly Herndon and Jordan Babineaux. Their visit was the first in the state this school year for the National Football League’s High School Tuesday program.

Tall, blond, fit and polished, Raihl is every inch a Sea Gal. Trust me, Raihl turns heads even in a turtleneck and long coat, her outfit the day we met at a Seattle restaurant last week.

Today, she’ll have an audience of millions. She’s in Detroit, where she and 31 other members of the Seattle Seahawks dance squad will perform and cheer at the team’s first Super Bowl appearance.

“It’s surreal, the Super Bowl,” Raihl said.

During her lunch of grilled chicken salad, she talked about high school and the years shortly afterward. She said classmates would never have guessed that today she’d be Sea Gal – dancing at the Super Bowl, no less.

Although she did cheerleading and played volleyball in high school, the image Raihl carried with her, she said, was of a “tuba-playing math geek.”

“She was a tuba player, but she was no geek,” countered Bruce Mouw, a retired Stanwood High School music teacher.

He recalled Raihl playing in the school’s brass quintet. It doesn’t surprise Mouw that his one-time pupil is in the limelight. He remembers her as “positive and enthusiastic. She was a lot of fun.”

Raihl said she was also much heavier than she is now.

“In high school, I weighed 40 or 50 pounds more. I played sports, but I didn’t grow up with much confidence,” she said. “By sixth grade, I was 5-foot-8, the same height I am now. I always felt big.”

Married young and with a baby at 22, she was living far from home in Florida. Unhappiness brought weight gain. “I used food to comfort myself,” she said. Right before her 23rd birthday, Raihl said, “I packed up my daughter and my suitcase and left.”

Divorced and ready to begin a new life back in Stanwood, she was determined to shed weight. She weighed 250 pounds. At home while her daughter MaKenna napped, Raihl worked out with kickboxing videotapes and an elliptical exercise machine.

“Divorce is very painful,” she said. “For me, exercise was an emotional release. I’m not a crier.”

She attended Skagit Valley Community College. A nutrition class taught her that “the good stuff is all on the outside edges of the supermarket – the produce, the dairy, the protein.”

In a year, through exercise and changed eating habits, she’d lost 120 pounds.

Hearing an ad for Sea Gals tryouts, she thought, why not? Classes at Westlake Dance Academy in Seattle and several rounds of grueling tryouts landed her on the squad. Nearly 300 young women try out each year. At 28, she’s been chosen as a Sea Gal three years in a row.

With 18-year-olds eligible to try out, Raihl isn’t sure if she’ll try for a fourth Seahawks season. “I’m old for the industry,” she said.

One incentive is the chance to dance with her daughter. When she turns 7, MaKenna will be eligible to be a Junior Sea Gal.

Off the football field, Raihl is a boat loan officer at a bank, lives in Seattle and is newly married.

Her daughter and her husband didn’t make the trip to Detroit. “We could buy a car” with what that would cost, she said. Paid by the hour, being a Sea Gal is no road to riches. She makes about $30 a game. At the Super Bowl, she’ll try to give MaKenna the secret wave she always gives her daughter during games.

For Stanwood High science teacher Susan Hauenstein, who remembers Raihl as a good student in biology, it’s fun to have someone she knows at the Super Bowl.

“The thing I remember, she had a big smile on her face every day,” Hauenstein said.

Jim Piccolo, Stanwood High School athletic director, said “we’re very, very proud of her representing the community of Stanwood.”

He remembers her as “a good athlete.” A Sea Gal from Stanwood at the Super Bowl? That, he couldn’t have imagined.

“It’s a real change for her. She really got out of her shell,” Piccolo said. High school, he added, “can be a very tough time for a lot of kids.”

Visiting her alma mater, Raihl said she told kids she “felt geeky, nerdy and unattractive” in high school. She told them not to be limited by “what you are today.”

A “devout Seahawks fan” who has watched games since she was 4 years old, Raihl also said she knows the Hawks can win.

“Every game,” she said, “I keep a little something for them in my head: Just play to your ability.”

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.