WuShock is a common sight at Wichita State sporting events and in the wild on campus. But, there is always speculation:
Who is the person behind the mask?
There are usually multiple people who don the mask at the same time to divide time between sporting events and general WuShock appearances.
Josh Nichols was one behind the mask from August 2018 to December 2020. He said he tried out to be the mascot because he realized he had “nothing to lose.”
“I just tried out, and I got the part, and had an absolute blast doing it,” he said. “Interacting with the team was always fun … and then we’d have the women’s basketball games where you’ve got 8,000 kids. It’s just an absolute blast doing that.”
Zach Cerre acted as WuShock from 2019 to 2023 after being the mascot at his high school.
“I wanted to continue my career as a mascot,” Cerre said. “(I loved) interacting with fans. I loved working with kids. I’m a teacher now … my students call me ‘Mr. WuShock.’”
Cerre now teaches pre-K through eighth grade technology, and seventh and eighth grade social studies at All Saints Elementary School in Wichita.
Another former Wu, Seth Hokanson, played his part from Spring 2020 to Spring 2025.
“Originally, I had applied because I was told there was a pretty decent scholarship,” Hokanson said. “That was not the case … after I got into it, I realized the enjoyment of it and how much I did actually enjoy doing it.
“I felt confident enough in the suit that I could walk into any building in Wichita and get into any part of any building … I’m not from Wichita originally, so there were some places and venues that I got to off-site events for, and I’d never been to before.”
While wearing the suit, Nichols was able to travel with the men’s basketball team to New York City for the National Invitational Tournament in 2019.
“That was a fun trip,” he said. “Unfortunately, the team lost the first game and didn’t stay for the second one to win the championship.”
Hokanson also got to travel while donning the WuShock costume. He went to places like Kansas City, Mo., and Fort Worth, Texas, and got to be on the floor with other spirit squad members in the American Conference tournament one year. “The places I got to go, and see and do,” he said, “I have a better understanding of the layout of Koch Arena than most people do because I’ve lived in there practically.”
Mascots need to warm up, too
During game days, it gets hot inside the suit and so some performers have a small routine they perform before getting in.
“I would stretch, drink some more water, warm up and then I would always be at the door ready,” Nichols said. “About 20 minutes before the game, going back down, taking a breather because it gets hot in the suit … (It) can be like 110 degrees almost every game, I was losing about 15 to 20 pounds in water.”
Cerre had a similar routine, but he would also jump around and get active before the games started. Hokanson also had his own mental routine before performing.
“I just took a second and took a deep breath and just sometimes verbally said, ‘I am no longer Seth, but I am Wu,’” Hokanson said. “I truly had to try to take on that mindset of high energy, big bad bundle of wheat.”
‘It’s supposed to be the character’
There’s a secretive element to wearing the suit, though some mascots let family and close friends in on it.
Nichols said he was a commuter student, so a lot of his time was spent with the Spirit Squad, but his family and a couple of close friends outside the squad knew about his job.
“Honestly, I prefer keeping it a secret rather than taking the spotlight away from WuShock and making it (about) myself,” Nichols said. “It’s supposed to be the character … it’s not about yourself, it’s about the school and the university and WuShock the character.”
Hokanson tried hard to keep the secret, because he felt like people knowing would change the perception of how people viewed both him and WuShock as a character.
“It’s not life or death for anyone to know that you’re the mascot,” Honkanson said. “If you have a reputation, that’s good or bad or otherwise, or you make mistakes in your life as we all do, if that’s a secret you’re a mascot, it doesn’t tie back to the mascot.”
Looking back – the good and the difficult
Nichols said that he loved his time as WuShock, and that he wanted to continue it professionally, but it didn’t work out.
“It was definitely worth it. I loved every single part of it,” Cerre said. “You, the student body, are the true WuShock. I was merely the one leading you those four years.”
Hokanson said that overall, donning the suit was an enjoyable experience, but some aspects, like the lack of a designated mascot team coach and a lack of management, were difficult.
“(We) fall under the coaching of the cheer coach … previous coaches didn’t really care, didn’t really want to take care of the mascots, so we had kind of fallen to assistant AD Tami (Cutler) … that’s outside her scope of work, that’s not in her job description,” Hokanson said. “At the end of my time, I was telling Tami and anybody who listened, ‘Hey, we need a coach … there is a guy who is willing and wants to coach.’ We told them that and no one has taken the steps moving forward with making that happen.”
Hokanson talked about meetings that he had with the athletic department before graduating and expressed his disappointment with the end of some of the conversations.
“I sat down and talked to Kevin Saal about the mascot program and the answer I pretty much got back was the university is charged with the task of trying to win championships in the 15 or 16 university sports we have and we’re not one of them,” he said. “Which is frustrating; there were times when it felt like the university didn’t really care about us or for us … the mascot program, it’s tough to call it a program when there’s not really a coach (and) is the redheaded stepchild of the redheaded stepchild of athletics.”
WuShock may not get all the support other athletics do, but that doesn’t diminish the importance or impact Wu has on the games, and the people behind the mascot.
