#76 | On Kelli Finglass
I didn't think my new leadership role-model would come from the NFL, but 2025 remains an absolutely wild ride.
Like the rest of America, my husband and I became OBSESSED with America’s Sweethearts when it premiered on Netflix last year. I was transfixed by the abs and the emotions. We practiced our high kicks in the living room. Neither of us attempted a jump split, but I would be lying if I said I didn't consider it. To be very honest, it’s kind of strange and against all odds that we both loved it so much.
First of all, I’m a proud Philadelphian. I was raised on soft pretzels, water ice, and spite. I believe that precise parallel parking is a civic virtue and in the curative power of Wawa. You better believe my first cigarette was a Newport. I’ve always loved being from an underdog city. And even though I can’t tell you I’m a diehard Eagles fan - I can’t tell you who the Eagles are playing each week or even what a tush push is (though I love to say it) - I can tell you: The Cowboys Suck.
Secondly, I think pro football is a real problem.
CTE is real. Exploitation is real. The commodification of bodies and patriotism and masculinity and trauma? ALL REAL. The NFL has always felt like a particularly Trumpy corner of American life. Not in a precise data driven way, just in that brittle-boned, flag-wrapped, militarized way that gives me hives all over my body. And Dallas? Dallas doesn’t really push back against this notion.
And third, because you know I love a list, I’ve always had complicated feelings about this kind of dance.
I was raised in the world of ballet. Russian ballet. The Vaganova method, if you want to get technical. Classical training. Tight buns. Silent studios. Teachers with sticks who’d poke us in the ribs when our bellies stuck out. Stern talking-tos if we changed our hair. We certainly didn’t smile when we danced. Our toes were always blistered and bloody. We were told to land as quietly as possible, lest we sound like an Elephant storming the Bastille or whatever weird example said Russian teacher gave. We wore leotards and pink tights and a general air of superiority.
We didn’t do tricks. We didn’t do rhinestones. We didn’t “hit” anything. The girls who did competitions, who danced to pop songs in sequined bra tops and won trophies? We didn’t talk about them much. But we looked down on them, quietly. The subtext was always clear: we were artists. They were performers. One was elevated - a true artistic lineage. The other, commercial.
So if you’re keeping track: no to the Cowboys, no to the NFL, no to competitive dance. The odds were never in the favor of America’s Sweethearts.
When we started America’s Sweethearts, I expected to laugh. Cringe, probably. Pick up some good fake tanning tips. But the first season disoriented me. I was rooting for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders? Crying for them? Following them on Instagram?! And then like everything else, we finished the season, moved onto other things and nearly forgot about our gals in blue and white.
But when my husband fired up the second season a few days ago, I was as excited as ever. And nearly immediately when we started watching, something even more unexpected happened: I found a new role model for professional leadership.
Kelli. Fucking. Finglass.
She’s not a coach. Not a quarterback. Not a choreographer or a CEO. She’s the longtime director, forty years, of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. She’s a woman who leads from a folding chair, or cross-legged on the floor, walkie talkie in hand. One scene she’s in Valentinos. The next, barefoot and crying to Kacey Musgraves.
Kelli Finglass is, without question, one of the most quietly compelling leaders I’ve ever seen on screen. She’s a breath of fresh (my guess is Jo Malone scented but I could be wrong) air.
Kelli is the coach of performers, but her leadership is the furthest thing from performative. She’s not handing out mantras or sharing productivity hacks. She doesn’t have a TED Talk or a book deal (though I would read it and I would go to Barnes and Noble for a signing and would listen to every single podcast she did on the book tour). She shows up. Season after season, for forty years, she shows the fuck up. She manages egos, injuries, devastation. She delivers corrections and comfort in the same breath. She leads with emotional pores so wide open that the largest Biore strip couldn’t tackle them. She also leads with incredibly high standards.
She’s not just living on vibes here - this woman has built something tangible and real. She started out as a cheerleader in the mid-’80s and took over as director in 1991. Since then, she’s transformed the team from halftime entertainment into a cultural institution: she professionalized their media presence, launched youth camps and merchandise lines, helped create and sustain Making the Team for years, and was a part of the Netflix deal where she now serves as an executive producer. HELLO she helped secure a place for the DCC’s iconic uniform in the SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY. And when the cheerleaders pushed for a significant raise last year, Kelli didn’t lead the charge, but she stood behind them. She called their advocacy brave and overdue. She didn’t flinch when her team wanted more, she helped make sure they were heard. This woman is a leader with a sparkling legacy.
Alas, she is not the kind of leader we’re taught to admire.
We are, or were, supposed to admire the Sandbergs (I TOLD YOU SO). The girlbosses (How are we still enabling the Gelmans of the world?!). The polished ones with tiny waists and perfect smiles and very good posture who scaled empathy like it was a start-up and sold us self-actualization as a service.
I’ve always said there are only two kinds of leaders: CEOs and cult leaders. And they’re basically the same. One has a keynote deck and a chief of staff, the other has incense and chic white clothing, but both have massive egos and know how to command a room. Both sell vision, even when, especially when, the vision is a little delusional.
I’ve always been more COO than CEO. I like building things behind the scenes. I like organizing people’s chaos. I’ve also, not entirely jokingly, said I’d make a great cult leader. Not for the power, but for the connection. The ability to look someone in the eye and make them feel like they matter. That they’re not just here to execute, but to belong and be well and love deeply. That there’s meaning in the everyday.
This is probably why I believe everyone would be happier in communal living, but that’s another essay.
Anyway, let’s circle back to the Sandbergs. The glossy corporate feminism is gross to me. I’ve never been the “Lean In” type. I don’t want to weaponize empathy or package my humanity into a TED Talk. That kind of leadership has always felt too clean. Too calibrated. There never seemed to be a messy middle. In fact, there never seemed to be anything real about it at all.
Kelli Finglass is not what you’d expect. Or maybe she is. She’s meticulous AND vulnerable, an unusual pairing. She’s inspirational in her utility, not because she is trying to be inspirational. It’s just the doing, the messy middle. She shows up. Season after season, year after year, she shows up.
I love how her producers see her. They give us her real cues, not a Housewives confessional, but little things, like the close-ups of her glasses when she takes them off in moments of stress. That’s her tell. And it hit me how rare it is to be allowed to tell stories through the lens of a woman who wears glasses, not as a quirky shorthand for “bookish” or “smart” but as a visual cue for an actual physical vulnerability. For needing help to see clearly. For needing to embrace the blur before things can become clear.
She demands excellence while still feeling everything, deeply. She shows up to say: you can have it all, but it’s going to be hard work, and it’s going to hurt like hell.
She tries to protect her team from the worst parts of the system while still honoring the spectacle that built it. She leads like someone who knows what it means to stay the course. And to change the course. And of course, my favorite thing, to hold contradiction without apology.
Early this season, she’s trying on outfits with a stylist. A makeover montage. Nothing feels right. And then she says, “I’d like a pantsuit like Kamala Harris.” I haven’t stopped thinking about this moment.
What does it mean to want to dress like Kamala Harris, polished, poised, Presidential, when your job is to direct the most objectified cheer squad in America? When your life’s work is women in briefs and boots? When your legacy is in the discipline of beauty? And you're doing it in Texas?
It means she holds the tension. She doesn’t see contradiction in caring about appearance and aspiring to power. Maybe this is not new news, but I think what makes it feel so radical is how she carries that tension with her as she walks. There’s not spectacle in it. It’s just her reality.
Her lack of spectacle is something I really love. It shows up in the quiet spirituality she brings to her leadership. It’s not broadcast, but it is visceral. She cries when her dancers cry. She calls their work a calling. She listens to Kacey Musgraves like it’s scripture.
Later in the season, the team is invited to perform onstage with Kacey, and Kelli is visibly struck by the mention of a Saturn Return in the track Deeper Well. Those of you who know anything about astrology, know that at 60, she’s in her second one.
A Saturn Return, especially the second, is a wrecking ball of full on reckoning, not just reinvention. It’s about becoming honest with who you are, not trying to become someone new. You hold your own story up to the light like a series of negatives from the past and decide what gets to stay and what absolutely positively must go.
In that moment, you feel her reckoning. Her exhaustion. Her tenderness. Her loyalty. Her grief. I imagine leading the way she does with active presence, not postured polish is a daily act of devotion. And it’s also probably very, very tiring.
But she keeps showing up.
She is soft. She is unshakeable. She is deeply uncool in a way that makes her cool again. I couldn’t have loved it more when she quoted “Forever Young,” the Rod Stewart version ofc, through tears at their end of the year banquet. To be very honest, “Forever Young,” always makes me cry - in Saturn Commercials, at the beginning of every episode of Parenthood and especially when I remember that we couldn’t figure out the right place for the Jay Z version at our wedding (did I want it to be our first dance? maybe). I love that she lives inside of all her feelings. It’s not a joke. It’s not camp. It’s not ironic. She loves Rod Stewart. His lyrics are meaningful to her. She means it. She feels it. I love that.
She believes in these women. Not abstractly. Not as a team. She believes in each of them individually. She believes in them in a way that would make any HR consultant flinch. Too much, too deeply. She believes in their right to more: more money, more protection, more reverence. And when she can’t get them everything, she finds a way to get them something. She doesn’t punish them for wanting. She empowers THEM to go get what THEY want. She builds.
Some things don’t make sense. But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.
And so yes. I, a Philadelphia-raised, ballet-schooled, football-skeptical, competitive-dance-skeptical, absolutely-sure-The-Cowboys-Suck woman, have found a model of leadership in Kelli Finglass.
My whole professional life is the messy middle. Not the COO (yet). Not the cult leader (yet, but I am ready for a reason to wear all white year round). Not the TED Talker (but a Moth stage, maybe?). I am just someone trying to lead in a way that feels honest on the worst days, generous on the best days, and human all the days in between.
But tomorrow, I want to lead like Kelli Finglass in her all active and engaged and over-involved presence, her shrewd perceptiveness and most importantly, her love and her humanity. Because it’s clear that at this moment especially, we need more leaders to lead with humanity at their core.
Chic Schmaltz La Vie,
LCF
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Loved this.