How to Be a Hollaback Girl

Even once they make the squad, the girls must pass a fitness test and a written exam before they can squeeze into that uniform and hope that the TV cameras will cut their way for a quick shot after a fumble. Sure, the exam is a little flimsy, and they get two chances to pass it. (Think questions from football knowledge to dining etiquette: If you are leaving the dinner table but will return, you should do what with your napkin? And then from naming the presidential candidates to grammar: What is wrong with the sentence "Who do those poms belong to?") But at least it's something.

"We don't just show up on Sunday mornings, work it out and then go out there," Kinder says. "It's very intense. It's my product—it's what I do. And I want it to be a perfect product."

In fact, Sunday mornings are an involved process. Cheerleaders get onto the field at 7:30 a.m. to get their pre-game rehearsal out of the way before the players show up. And then they head into three hours of hair and makeup with a professional team of about five hairdressers and several makeup artists to fluff, tease and paint them to perfection. They achieve a glossed-over look of perfection, or as Kinder puts it, a celebrity glamour that is "sexy, not slutty. Classy, not trashy."

Aside from the game performances, there are the community appearances. Last year, the cheerleaders made more than 200 appearances around the community—paid, charitable and otherwise. For enough money, you could even rent your very own Titans cheerleader for a party—not to mention buy the swimsuit calendar or purchase a headshot of your favorite girl online. "NFL cheerleading is very much a business," says Kinder, a dancer with a degree in finance and marketing. "We generate a considerable amount of revenue each year."

Still, the cheerleaders don't see much of that. They're all strongly encouraged to have another job. And many of them do. They have careers, school, children and husbands—sometimes all of the above. "The obvious is that [a Titan's cheerleader] is beautiful and she's physically fit and she's talented," Kinder says. "But the not so obvious is that she is intelligent and success-driven and career-minded. It's tough to find women who have all of that."

Take Melissa Hodges. The 23-year-old may be the hottest, blondest scientist you'll ever meet. With a bachelor's degree in neuroscience from Vanderbilt, she's not the bimbo you'd expect. Her look is undeniably Jessica Simpson-esque, minus the whole lightheaded, Chicken of the Sea imbecility. Hodges uses big words, scientific words, that most of us couldn't spell—let alone pronounce—even if we tried. Even when she dumbs down her lab work into layman's terms, it's difficult to follow the words escaping her perfectly pink glossed lips. When she talks about using the post-mortem brain tissue of Alzheimer's patients to test how they react to certain medications, her blue eyes sparkle like her diamond-studded earring and blindingly white teeth. She's even adorable (and all the more awesome) when she talks about how she and her colleagues must guillotine rodents to study their brains. (Sorry, PETA. It's not every day that you meet a cheerleader who chops off rat heads.)

She's in her second season cheering for the Titans organization, but she thinks it might be her last if her med school plans come through. And while her colleagues know that she's a cheerleader and "they think it's great," Hodges says her boss doesn't know. "I do worry about the judgment," she says. "I want to be taken seriously."

As a girl who grew up dancing, the pocket-sized Hodges says she wasn't sure what to do with herself when she graduated from Vanderbilt, where she was a member of the university's dance team. The Titans seemed a natural progression. She, like many of her counterparts, likes football well enough. But she hungers for performance. And she doesn't mind all that comes along with it.

"I have a very serious, academic, rigorous day behind a microscope where I'm pretty quiet and isolated, and then I can flip the switch and dance and perform," she says. "It keeps me balanced."

The thing is, it is difficult to see her as a scientist. There's just a lot of blonde, a lot of cheerleader and a lot of bare skin to get past. Does that make her a bimbo? No. But it does make her a neuroscientist who shakes her ass any given Sunday. And it's not like the Titans organization is doing much to promote these women as brainiacs. Last we checked, the only interview process cheerleading candidates go through takes place behind closed doors. We can tell you where to buy a swimsuit calendar though.

When asked about her interaction with drunken, big-bellied, beer-breathed fans whose "get me a piece of that" comments must get a little grating, Hodges tucks a golden lock behind her ear and gives what you can only assume to be her best stock beauty pageant answer. "We've seen it all," she says with a forgiving smile. "We always try to tell ourselves that there will come a day sooner probably than later that no one will want to take our picture."