Gabi Butler

Gabriella “Gabi” Butler was born January 16, 1998 in Boca Raton, Florida. She started competitive cheerleading at age eight and grew up traveling between Florida, Georgia, and California to train with the most demanding programs in the country. By her early teens she was flying for California All Stars Smoed — at the time the most-watched all-girl level 5 team in the world — and had become one of the recurring faces of AwesomenessTV’s Cheerleaders YouTube series, which racked up tens of millions of views during the 2012–2014 era and gave the wider public its first sustained look at what elite club cheerleading actually demanded.

She moved through the sport’s blue-chip programs the way a top recruit moves through a single sport — Smoed, Top Gun TGLC, Cheer Athletics Wildcats, Gymtyme Blink. The throughline across each was the same: she was known for flexibility, precision in stunting, and the ability to fly clean basket tosses and pyramid skills under pressure. Multiple world title runs followed.

In January 2020 Netflix released the docuseries Cheer, which followed Navarro College’s 14-time NCA national-champion squad and put Gabi at the center of its narrative arc. The series became a cultural moment. A second season in January 2022 followed her return to Navarro and the program’s response to the Jerry Harris case. Across both seasons she was the most-discussed athlete on the show — partly for the skills, mostly for the work ethic the cameras caught when she didn’t realize they were rolling.

After the second season she took an unexpected detour: in November 2022 she signed with WWE, joining the company’s developmental track. She has been candid in interviews that the cheerleading industry had been her entire world up to that point and that she wanted to see what else her body could do. She left WWE in 2024 and returned to elite club cheer with Top Gun Allstars Double O for the 2025–26 season, alongside coaching, camp work, and creator partnerships.

In February 2026 Varsity Spirit named her Lead Brand Ambassador while she competes in Houston with the Pro Cheer team — a role that puts her at the front of the sport’s biggest commercial platform after twenty years inside it. Her arc is a rare one in athletics: peak at 14, sustain through 28, and turn the platform into a career rather than a memory.