Park Ki-ryang, a 23-year-old professional cheerleader, was selected as the best cheerleader of the year for two consecutive years. (image: Youtube capture)
SEOUL, Dec. 22 (Korea Bizwire) — In professional athletic events such as baseball, basketball and soccer games, there are always cheerleaders appearing between innings, breaks between quarters or during the half-time break. Spectators usually assume they are low-paid college coed part-timers. But some of them are as high-priced as the athletes themselves.
Park Ki-ryang, a 23-year-old professional cheerleader who was selected as the best cheerleader of the year for two consecutive years, is well known among professional sports fans for her flashy dance moves and boasts the status of the highest-paid cheerleader in Korea.
She works for the Lotte Giants during summer months and for the Ulsan Mobis Phoebus during the winter basketball season. She often appears on TV show programs and brags her dance skills as good as top girl groups. On December 18, Park was seen on “Happy Together,” a variety show program on KBS2-TV, perfectly imitating the dance moves of girl group EXID. Park was envied by others on the show by saying she is 176 centimeters (5 feet 9 inches) while weighing only 48 kilograms (106 pounds).
She began her cheerleading career in 2007 by working for the Ulsan Mobis Phoebus and is now working for several other clubs such as the Guri KDB Life Winnus (women’s basketball) and Daejeon Samsung Fire Bluefangs (men’s volleyball). Even though the annual pay of cheerleaders differs individually, anyone with experience of five to six years tends to earn about 25-30 million won.
By Celena Jung (celena@koreabizwire.com)
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Park Ki-ryang is certainly beautiful, but not beautiful only. Part of what makes her wonderful to watch is her actions which are confident, crisp and every one well executed. She exudes youth, vitality and enthusiasm, together with the precision of a gymnast. She is, I am certainly very talented, but it is abundantly clear that she invest a lot of herself in practice, which requires hard work. I am not sure wether or not she has the responsibility of choreographing all the routines, but all of them are very well done. Athletic, and strong, without being ballet. And the troupe is always well trained. Always very appropriate for the team sports environment.