Provo • There are two questions the dancers at BYU keep getting.
No. 1: Can you do that in Provo?
No. 2: Who is he?
BYU’s Football Team is 1-5, but the Dance team is undefeated pic.twitter.com/Y9DdB7wS4U
— Daniel Dudley (@DDisBORED) October 9, 2017
The latter, most often, is followed by a series of demands: Unmask him! We want his name!
More than one reporter has come around campus asking questions since Shaye Edwards and her Cougarette teammates went viral with a game-night routine that rocked LaVell Edwards Stadium on Friday night.
The first is easy enough to answer. Yes, you can dance in Utah County and there’s no better proof of that than the 16-time national champion Cougarettes. But the mystery man who was front and center of their sensational performance will stay hidden in his mascot costume for now.
“Then we’d have to kill you,” said Jodi Maxfield, the dance team’s coach.
Instead, the Cougarettes would prefer to just kill it on the dance floor, or anywhere else the beat might drop.
When Edwards and her fellow captains, junior Nicole Thorley and sophomore Emry Wride, hashed out their most recent routine a little over a week ago, they figured they’d put together something the fans at Friday night’s game would enjoy.
“We want to make sure the crowd was going to be into it,” Thorley said. “We wanted to put in some tricks that people would like. But it was more of a relaxed routine for us that we could just have fun with.”
But by the time the last note of Ayo & Teo’s “Rolex” had played, the 18 members of the Cougarettes’ dance team had flipped onto the turf, and the school’s mascot, Cosmo, had pointed his finger into the air, Maxfield knew they’d struck gold.
“The crowd just went crazy,” she said. “Even during the game, I had a lot of people texting me, saying, ‘That was insane. Lit.’ The things they say.”
And just like that, a viral sensation was born.
Since Friday night, the Cougarettes’ routine has been share and retweeted tens of thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook. They’ve been featured on CBS and have been interviewed by Inside Edition and the Washington Post. They’ve been contacted by the song’s creators asking to collaborate on some future project.
Cosmo, the mascot, text messages the dancers whenever a celebrity retweets the routine.
“The hardest thing for us is him not getting recognition for the person that he is,” Maxfield said. “He gets it as the mascot.”
“It’s frustrating,” Thorley said.
“Some day everyone will know,” Maxfield said.
Here’s what the Cougarette’s will share about the man behind the mask: He is male, and a senior at the university. He is not a member of the dance team and, in fact, has no formal dance training in his background.
“He’s still a pretty good dancer,” Jodi said. “We wouldn’t let anybody dance with us that wasn’t able to keep up with the girls.”
The Cougarettes are pretty tough to keep up with. They’ve won 16 national dance championships in their history, most recently in 2016, and they have had plenty of success with their hip-hop performances at competitions.
“Do they really think that we don’t dance at BYU?” Edwards wondered with a laugh. “We have such a huge dancer department. It’s crazy that they think we’re not allowed to do this kind of stuff. It’s comical.”
This particular Cosmo is a long-time supporter of the dance program. He watches Cougarette’s routines and picks up moves here and there. A few years ago, he drove to Florida to watch them compete in the national tournament.
In Maxfield’s 28 years at BYU, she believes there have been maybe two or three Cosmos who have been asked to learn some choreography for performances, and only one who has been ever asked to learn a full routine. The Cougarettes called on their mascot last year for a performance, and knew they wanted to include him again this season.
When he arrived for his first rehearsal, Thorley said, “he was on point.”
“He knew the whole thing,” Edwards said.
“He’s never trained in dance,” Thorley said.
After two or three rehearsals in the week leading up to Friday’s game, Cosmo and the Cougarettes were ready to take the field.
“He was incredible,” Wride said with a smile. “What other school has a mascot that can do that?”