The coach sits across from Craig Hallmark, scoresheet gripped tight. The math doesn’t add up in her mind—or maybe it does, and that’s the problem. Her team worked for months. They hit clean. And the placement still stings.
Craig leans in. Not defensive. Just present.
“Walk me through what you’re seeing,” he says.
She does. He listens. Really listens. Then he picks up the rubric and starts breaking it down—not to prove her wrong, but to help her see what the judges saw. Line by line. Skill by skill. His voice stays steady. Calm. By the end, she’s nodding. She might not love the score, but now she understands where it comes from.
“He has this calm confidence that he’s able to relay information to coaches within score review,” says Melissa Hay, Director of Scoring for The Allstar Cheer Championships. “He makes your opinion feel heard.”
That’s Craig. Three decades in cheerleading, and he’s still showing up for the hard conversations. Still explaining the same concepts to different people in different rooms at different competitions. Over and over, because he believes people deserve to understand the systems that affect them and their athletes.
He didn’t set out to become the person everyone calls when scoring doesn’t make sense. But here he is—former gym owner, judge, coach, choreographer— and now Scoring Director for the Open Championship Series building the infrastructure that thousands of programs rely on every season.
And if you ask the people who know him best, they’ll tell you: the systems he builds are extensions of who he’s always been.
Craig Hallmark: At a Glance
Role: Scoring Director, Open Championship Series
Location: Oklahoma
Experience: 30+ years in competitive cheerleading
Background: Coach, gym owner (Oklahoma Twisters), judge, choreographer
Also Founded: J&C Cheer Camps, 5678 Solutions
Known For: Transparency in scoring systems, judge education, creating the first formal score review process
The First One In
Craig was the first male cheerleader at Blanchard High School.
Let that sit for a minute. Small town Oklahoma. Late 1990s. Walking into a space where you don’t fit the mold takes guts. But Craig didn’t just walk in, he showed up and then he stayed. He competed. And he loved it. That brought him on to cheer in college, where he became a mascot, and kept competing in all-star cheer.
“As the first male cheerleader at Blanchard High School, connection and inclusion were not always guaranteed,” says Levi Harrel-Hallmark, Craig’s husband. “That experience continues to shape how he shows up today.”
That thread runs through everything. Creating spaces where people truly belong. Making sure the kid from the small gym gets the same fair shot as the program everyone knows. Building systems that don’t exclude based on size or politics or who you know.
He wasn’t thinking about that in high school, obviously. He was busy falling in love with the sport. But those early experiences—being the outlier, proving his place, earning respect—formed the foundation for how he leads now.
The Drive That Changed Everything
Early 2000s. Craig owned and coached at Oklahoma Twisters, was judging regularly, and yet – getting more frustrated by the week.
Scoring issues kept happening. Same problems, different competitions. “Phone calls and emails weren’t enough,” Craig says simply. So Craig did what Craig does: he drove to Dallas and asked for a meeting with NCA leadership.
In person. Face to face.
That meeting introduced the first formal score review process for coaches—what Justin Carrier jokingly called a “Hallmark Card.” A way for coaches to challenge scores professionally, with structure and accountability.
It may sound small. It wasn’t.
It established a core principle that, because of Craig, many see as a right in cheer today: transparency matters. People deserve answers. And systems should serve people, not confuse them.
From there, Craig became one of the early voices pushing for formalized judge certification. Before USASF’s safety program, judges were mostly picked through word of mouth. No real training. No consistency. Craig wanted better—for judges, for coaches, for athletes, and the industry overall.
“Craig has been part of the early years of the all-star industry and understands the complexity in developing a consistent scoring system,” Hay says. “One strong trait that he has is listening to everyone. In developing OCS, he listened to the judges as well as the coaches. From there he used that information in making his decisions—being responsive, not reactive.”
Responsive, not reactive. That’s something that makes him different.
What Judging Taught Him
“Being a judge completely changed how I view routines and the industry,” Craig says. “I loved coaching and choreographing when I owned Oklahoma Twisters, but sitting on the panel gave me a whole new perspective.”
He started noticing the tiny technical details coaches miss. He listened to veteran judges break down routines. He saw how differently trained judges could interpret the same skills.
And he realized: the system was broken.
Not because judges were bad. Because training was inconsistent, standards were unclear, and coaches had no real pathway to understanding what they were being scored on.
So when the four founders of Open Championship Series approached him in 2019, Craig saw an opportunity.
“I had known all four Open owners for over 20 years,” he says. “They trusted me to lead.”
He’d just sold his gym. His other businesses were growing. He finally had bandwidth to build something different.
So he did.
The Human Behind the Rubric
Here’s what people don’t always see: Craig is funny. Like, genuinely funny. He’s thoughtful. He’s a good friend—the kind who suggests opportunities to people even when there’s nothing in it for him.
“On a personal level, Craig is the most honest and loyal friend,” says Brooke Wojcik, who’s known him for 20 years. “Even as one-time competitors against each other, his sportsmanship never wavered. Now, having both moved into different roles in the industry, he has suggested opportunities to me in which he knew I could thrive.”
Kyle Gadke of Spirit FX has known Craig outside of cheer for over a decade. “Aside from ‘Scoring Director Craig,’ outside of cheer he is an amazing human being who sees good in people, is kind, and wants to advance this sport and scoring to its fullest potential.”
That kindness shows up in the work. In how he trains judges. In how he sits in score review. In how he designs systems that make scoring accessible to everyone, not just the programs with resources.
Jennifer “Big Red” Cooper experienced it firsthand: “When I spoke with Craig, I felt like I was talking to a teammate. I could feel his matched effort and passion to make a difference that only a great teammate could understand. He makes your opinion feel heard.”
