Empowered Women Series: Cara Heise

All Cara Heise wanted when she was younger was to be a cheerleader. The Pop Warner team used to practice across the street from her house. She would be out on the front porch watching the cheerleaders and learning their cheers.

"My mom and dad didn't want me to be a cheerleader," Heise said. "But I was determined."

After a lot of asking, Heise was finally allowed to join a team. Three years later, she joined an all-star team, which is similar to a club team.

"I always loved the competition season in Pop Warner and that's all I wanted to do," Heise said. "I didn't really care about cheering on the football teams."

All-star cheerleading is only competition-based.

"There was one point, where for about eight months, I was cheering seven days a week," Heise said. "I would have high school practice Monday through Thursday with games on Wednesdays and Friday and then I'd have all-star practice Sunday and Thursday nights. On Saturdays, I was in the gym working on new skills."

Heise did that for three years before she had to make a choice between high school cheer and competitive cheer due to scheduling conflicts. She ultimately chose high school. Heise continued to work on new skills because she dreamed of cheering in college. The time came and she tried out for the team at Northern Arizona University.

"I remember being really nervous because everyone was so outgoing and I'm not like that when I'm around new people," Heise said. "I completely bombed my tryout, but I was okay with that."

She realized that college cheerleading was a lot different than she was used to, but she was happy she tried. It was time to close that chapter of her life.

Heise attended NAU where she double majored in Journalism and Political Science with a minor in Law and Society. Journalism was something she picked up in high school. Politics always interested her.

In her junior year of college, she applied for an internship in the athletics department.

"I took the risk and applied for something that was a little outside of my comfort zone," Heise said. "I knew I loved athletics and I love communications, so I figured why not."

It was there she was introduced to the world of sports information. She worked with football, volleyball, women's soccer, men and women's basketball, and men and women's tennis.

"I was in awe of all of the little things that go into athletics communications. I didn't realize that to truly staff a home event, you need at least four people just on the communications side," Heise said. "I honestly didn't even know this was an actual job."

Working with Twitter and Snappy TV, Heise would sit behind her laptop at games and cut highlight clips and tweet them on the different teams' Twitter accounts. Her senior year, Heise worked with the football SID on the stats for home games. Heise says she remembers sheets of paper, almost like a spreadsheet, where I had to write down the time on the clock, the down, what happened on the play, any penalties that occurred, and where the play ended.

"We ended the game with like 14 sheets of those and I had to number them or else I'd lose track of the order." Heise said.

She was shocked at how much she enjoyed her internship, but she wasn't going to give up on being a reporter just yet.

She also wrote for The Daily Sun, the local newspaper in Flagstaff. Heise was the beat reporter for Coconino High School football for a semester.

"I spent every Wednesday at their practice to interview players and coaches for the game preview and every Friday night freezing my butt off covering their games," Heise said. "Seeing my byline for the first time in a local newspaper is something I'll never forget."

After graduation, Heise attended the University of Southern California where she received her master's degree in Journalism. While there, she continued her focus on athletics. Her capstone project focused on the lack of coverage of women's sports in the media, in which she used the Palomar women's basketball team as her main character.

In her second semester, she had the opportunity to work with the National Football League's Speaker Bureau. She worked with a small group of former professional football players and helped them learn different social media techniques.

"It was a really cool experience," Heise said. "I loved showing people how to use social media to craft a story."

With graduation fast approaching, Heise didn't know what she was going to do with her degrees. She knew she didn't want to be a traditional reporter. She had dabbled with audio storytelling, but nothing seemed to truly pique her interest the way her internship had. One day after class she got a phone call from her mom telling her she had volunteered Heise for something at Palomar.

"My mom said, 'I kinda threw you under the bus this morning in our meeting'," Heise said. "She had volunteered me to assist with the website. I didn't really know what to expect, but I was excited for the opportunity."

That's when Heise spoke with then-Athletic Director, Scott Cathcart, about filling in to run the website and keep it up to date.

Since Heise was still in school, she would write stories from box scores and text messages from coaches during her classes. Since then, she has dived head-first into updating the communications side of things for Palomar. She was the creator of the main Palomar Athletics social media accounts, she redesigned the website, is working on creating an alumni database, as well as other exciting projects.

"It's really cool and fun to build things up from scratch," Heise said. "I've learned a lot in my two years here, and I have a lot of room to grow. I'm really proud of where things are now, as far as social media and the website go, but I have big plans for where I want them to be. It's only up from here."