It was a late autumn morning in 1995, and Dennis Brolin had a job to do. As field superintendent for the New England Patriots, he was tasked with the responsibility of preparing the Foxboro Stadium playing surface for an upcoming showdown against the New York Jets, and on this particular morning he was planning to lay down those all-important white lines that chronicle the ebb and flow of each game.
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One small problem: A Patriots coach was out there on the sideline — right smack at the 50-yard line, dammit — preparing to conduct some kind of drill.
“You can’t come out on the field, we’re still painting,” said Brolin.
“Well, I’m coming out on the field,” said the Patriots coach, and a signal was given to begin the drill, white lines or no white lines.
“Well, it would be extremely difficult for us to get the field ready if you’re out here,” Brolin countered.
At which point the Patriots coach turned to the group and said, “OK, let’s go,” and they walked out to the field to commence with the drill.
It took a couple more minutes of awkward negotiations, but, finally, a grudging compromise was reached: The Patriots coach agreed to hold the practice drill in the end zone.
Brolin motioned for his equipment to be moved to midfield. The painting commenced.
And so it was that Dennis Brolin came to know one Tracy Sormanti, and, OK, sure, she wasn’t a football coach. Her official title for all those years she worked for the New England Patriots was cheerleading director.
Except that the thinking at 1 Patriots Place has always been that Tracy Sormanti was as much a coach of theirs as anybody who ever wore a set of headphones, or a hoodie, or an attitude. She ran New England’s cheerleading squad for 27 seasons, beginning in 1994, shortly after local businessman/longtime season ticket holder Robert Kraft bought the team, and over the years her squads represented the Patriots at 10 Super Bowls. Sormanti took the Super Bowl trips seriously: She wanted her cheerleaders to do more than lead the cheers. She wanted them to be dancers, entertainers, performers.
And more than anything, Tracy Sormanti wanted them to be ambassadors.
She organized USO tours that sent Patriots cheerleaders all over the world.
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She later helped form a partnership with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute that raised more than $400,000 through “Patriots Junior Cheerleaders” clinics. And there’s some poignancy here, considering that it was cancer — multiple myeloma — that claimed Tracy Sormanti’s life. She died not quite one year ago, on Dec. 4, 2020, just 58 years old, her passing announced via a lengthy press release from the Patriots that made note of “her own core values: commitment, dedication, accountability, responsibility and a positive attitude.”
On Saturday, Tracy Sormanti will be posthumously inducted into the Patriots Hall of Fame as a contributor. She will be the first woman to be inducted, and only the third contributor. The others are the late Billy Sullivan, who founded the original Boston Patriots of the American Football League, and the late Gil Santos, the legendary, velvet-voiced announcer who called Pats games on the radio for decades.
It will surely be quite an honor for Tracy to be posthumously honored by the Patriots Hall of Fame.
And she surely would have hated it, all of it.
“She would be horrified — and I mean horrified — to be getting this kind of attention,” said Kalen Samsel, 50, a Patriots cheerleader from 1994 to 2001. “Tracy just didn’t like getting noticed. That’s the way she was. But it’s a shame she’s not here to see it. It’s a shame we’re not able to see it with her.”
Tracy was still listed on the team’s masthead as director of cheerleading at the time of her passing, even though she had been battling the cancer for months. That the cheerleaders weren’t actually working, because the Pats were playing games in an empty Gillette Stadium as the pandemic was raging, made no difference. The cheerleading corps still existed; Tracy Sormanti was still their leader.
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“She was very proud of the team,” Brolin said. “She wanted her cheerleaders to be well-respected in the public eye. Doing the extra things, doing the charitable events. A lot of things they weren’t expected to do, they did.”
Sormanti, foreground, with some of the Patriots cheerleaders. (Courtesy of Dennis Brolin)So, who was Tracy Sormanti? She was Rhode Island all the way, graduating from Veterans Memorial High School of Warwick in 1982 and then moving on to Johnson & Wales University in Providence. She was a Patriots cheerleader from 1983 to 1985, and then returned in ’91. She was named director in 1994.
Though the Pats’ cheerleading program had become her career — “Tracy took it so seriously in terms of wanting to put the best representatives on the field,” said Samsel — she had so many other interests. She studied karate. She enjoyed kayaking. She loved animals, especially her cats and two Akita dogs.
“She always knew your pet’s name,” said Amber Koppen, a Patriots cheerleader from 2003 to 2006. “She knew the name of the pet you had before you had that pet.”
And beer. Tracy Sormanti loved beer. She loved it more when it was served in some small bar or tavern, and ever the more so when it included funny stories and deep, hearty laughter.
Samsel remembers how Tracy’s face would get contorted into all kinds of funny shapes when she was laughing.
“She was the biggest goofball if you really, truly knew her,” she said. “She was such a clown. Never cared about being the pretty girl, like a typical cheerleader. She was gorgeous, but she’d make those faces, the funniest faces, when she laughed. She could laugh and snort and be ridiculous.”
Sormanti with a furry friend. (Courtesy of Dennis Brolin)When Tracy and Amber Koppen got together, “It was margaritas more often than beers,” said Koppen. “And she had the most contagious laugh for someone who worked so hard and could be so serious.
“She could be so strong and so assertive, and so hardworking, almost a little intimidating,” said Koppen. “And then she would turn around and be the funniest person you ever met. She was cute and sexy and all of that, but also funny and caring. She was someone you wanted to hang out with.”
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Amber Koppen has spent her entire life in football: Her father is Mark van Eeghen, a Massachusetts native who played on two Super Bowl-winning teams with the John Madden/Tom Flores-era Oakland Raiders before closing out his career with the Patriots in ’82 and ‘83. Her husband is former Patriots center Dan Koppen. And to illustrate the breadth of her Patriots ties, her father worked under Dante Scarnecchia, the longtime Pats assistant, and her husband worked with Scarnecchia during his own days in New England. But despite all this familiarity with the Patriots, and with cheerleading, Amber Koppen was entirely unprepared the time Sormanti asked her to represent the team by emceeing an event in which the cheerleaders would appear.
“I was, like, oh God no … no, no, no … I told her I don’t talk in front of people, that’s not my thing,” she said. “And Tracy said, ‘No, you’re doing it.’ I said, ‘No, I dance, I don’t talk.’ She said, ‘OK, then. That’s fine.’”
Minutes later, Tracy approached Koppen and said, “Here’s your script. You’re doing it. I want you to do it, and I think you’ll be good at it.’ So I did it. But she also worked with me for two weeks, teaching me when to bring people up on the stage, when to slow down, and all that. She had more faith in me than I did.”
Let’s mince no words: Tracy put the hours in.
“I worked as her assistant for a while,” said Koppen. “I would leave, and she would work for several more hours, and the next morning she would be there before I arrived.”
Brolin remembers Tuesdays and Thursdays in particular, when Tracy would work until 11 p.m.
“And there would be practice on Saturday,” he said. “On game day she didn’t get home until 11 or 12, sometimes 1 or 2 in the morning.”
It’s important to note that Denny Brolin’s uncomfortable first meeting with Sormanti was literally the prelude to a kiss, as their relationship went from adversarial to professional, from friendly to friends, and, for many years thereafter, to life partners.
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That last part — the leap to life partners — began in 2000.
“One day she approached me in my office and asked me if I had some time to help her with something,” Brolin said. “I told her I’m kind of busy right now and can we talk about this tomorrow. But you could tell she was frustrated. She kind of looked down and gave me the old shoulder shrug and said, ‘OK, I can deal with this myself.’”
A day later, Brolin popped into Tracy’s office and asked if she still needed some assistance. She told him she was trying to put something together for an upcoming preseason party for the cheerleaders and their families, to be held at the stadium.
“We wound up spending three days building this prop for her party,” he said. “It was this big box, with plastic all over it, built to look like water. That’s what it was. And we had the best time ever putting it together.
“At that point, I saw the other side of her. And she saw the other side of me. It wasn’t business. It wasn’t structure. It wasn’t putting on a facade that we had to be tougher than each other. We had fun with it, and I think that’s where it started.”
He asked her out for a drink at the Chieftain Pub, a local haunt in Plainville, about seven miles from the stadium. They kept things quiet for a while, but the skulduggery ceased after about a year. They became a couple that just happened to work at the same company, a company that just happened to be the New England Patriots.
And to think it all started with a spat about white lines and cheerleading drills, followed by a few years of chilly co-existence.
“Ownership told us to deal with it, and for the next five years we dealt with it,” Brolin said of that 1995 tug of war at the 50-yard-line at old Foxboro Stadium.
The result, he said, delivering an accidental but perfect pun, “was that we found common ground.”
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Brolin left the Patriots in 2003 to run his own construction company, now known as Sports Turf Specialties. The relationship with Tracy continued.
“We were soul mates,” said Brolin.
In the last weeks of Tracy’s life, at a time when she was receiving home hospice care and unable to receive visitors because of the pandemic, a letter-writing campaign began. All kinds of people from all walks of Tracy’s life — old friends, former cheerleaders, employees from other departments inside Gillette Stadium — began jotting down their thoughts, their anecdotes, their prayers, their good cheer, and sending along their missives. Denny Brolin would sit in the bed next to Tracy and read them to her. She also received a video greeting from Robert Kraft.
“There were 30 or 40 letters a day,” Brolin said. “She couldn’t speak but she could react. She would listen with her eyes closed. She truly felt not only respected but loved.”
Samsel recalled a day spent kayaking with Tracy on Long Pond in Lakeville.
“This was at a point when she was really sick, and I was one of the friends she felt like she could say anything to,” Samsel said. “She admitted she was scared and nervous about what was to come. She was always a very private person, and she told me she didn’t want a lot of attention to be focused on her at the end.”
Come Saturday at the Patriots Hall of Fame, a whole of attention will be focused on Tracy Sormanti.
(Top photo of Sormanti: Stan Grossfeld / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
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