Patriots cheerleader by night, student by day, she’s headed to the Super Bowl
From behavioral neuroscience to cheerleading for the New England Patriots, Lana Vogler shares how she ended up heading to the Super Bowl and why America’s biggest game is oddly “a stress relief” for her.
For most introverts, performing in front of 68,000 people is a nightmare. For Lana Vogler, it’s just another weekend.
For the last two years, Vogler has spent her weekends taking to the field with the New England Patriots cheerleading squad. Now, with the Patriots headed to the Super Bowl, the National Football League’s biggest game and America’s largest sporting event, Vogler is preparing for the performance of a lifetime.
“I’m just so overwhelmingly excited for the Super Bowl,” Vogler said. “The energy of the crowd is insane. Even if they might not be cheering for you while you’re dancing, it feels like they are, and you don’t get that same kind of hype wherever else you perform.”
For Vogler, who has been bouncing between the intense energy of NFL stadiums and the insular world of studying behavioral neuroscience and philosophy at Northeastern University, Super Bowl weekend is a chance to, on the biggest stage possible, do what she’s committed her life to: dance.
But how did a college student make it to an NFL cheerleading team, let alone the Super Bowl?
Vogler has been dancing since the age of 3. She recalled walking from her preschool to Dance Connection Palo Alto, the studio she stayed with for 15 years. The Bay Area native spent most of her life in dance competitions, practicing all kinds of styles from ballet to hip-hop dance.
It was a big enough commitment of time and energy that Vogler had already fallen in and out of love with dance by the time she graduated high school. At various points, she even considered putting dance aside and committing to lacrosse, but she always came back to it.
“For whatever reason, I could never quit,” Vogler said. “I don’t know why I never left. There was something about staying and finishing it out and having that community.”
At the same time, in high school, Vogler’s fascination in true crime and serial killers blossomed into a deep curiosity about the brain and why people are the way they are. That interest led her to Northeastern, where she spent her first year studying abroad in London as part of the NU Bound program.
Having been brought up in the suburbs, jumping into big city life in London was overwhelming at first, Vogler admitted. But it also forced her out of her comfort zone and, after a year away from the dance floor, helped her fall back in love with dance.
When she came to Northeastern’s Boston campus, she knew she didn’t want to dance competitively. Dancing 30 hours per week in high school while missing out on time with her family and friends had left her drained, she said. But she still missed the adrenaline rush of performing and moving.
“That high level of intensity, I enjoy that,” Vogler said. “That moving of the body, the workouts, the challenging my brain, I really enjoy getting pushed like that.”
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She found all of that on the Patriots cheerleading team.
Joining the team in 2024, Vogler found a dance style that fit her own, which had already been shaped by instructors at her Bay Area studio who danced for the San Francisco 49ers. She also found the same sense of community that had kept her coming back to dance.
“When one succeeds, we all do, and so having the mentality that we are better together is extremely important,” said Driss Dallahi, manager for the Patriots cheerleaders.
To have a safe space to return to has been a big mental health boost for Vogler, she said. That doesn’t mean dancing for the team is easy though.
The Patriots cheerleaders dance a lot more than other teams do during regular season games, even though they only practice twice a week. All in all, the cheerleaders will do seven dances per game along with “fillers,” an array of 50-plus short dances they perform during short breaks during games.
“The ability to manage your time … between your full-time job, family, friendships, relationships, and your role as a cheerleader is a juggling act,” Dallahi said. “Those that make the team demonstrate that they have both the mental and physical tenacity to get through a full NFL football season.”
Dallahi compared Vogler to an offensive football player who “attacks everything with fierceness and ferocity.”
Patriots cheerleaders also have mandated appearances at community events, like parades and awards ceremonies, throughout New England. They have to sign up for at least 20 of these; Vogler signed up for 130 this season. It’s one of her favorite parts of the job, she said.
“Everyone just looks up to you so much and you don’t realize it until you’re hanging out with children, little dancers, who idolize you and think you’re a superhero,” Vogler said.
Looking to Super Bowl LX, which will be held back in Vogler’s neck of the woods in San Francisco, her nerves have yet to get the best of her. The Patriots cheerleaders will only perform once, which, unlike at most games, will give Vogler a chance to “take it all in,” halftime show and all, she said.
“You have one shot and that’s it, so we can focus all our time on making sure that one dance is going to look absolutely perfect when we go out there,” Vogler said. “So, it’s kind of like a stress relief.”
