Cheerleading Coach Molested 10 Young Girls At South OC YMCA, High School

ORANGE COUNTY, CA — A man who served as a cheerleading coach in Orange County has been convicted on 23 felony counts for molesting 10 girls as young as 9 years old, county prosecutors said Wednesday.

Erick Joseph Kristianson, 46, was convicted Monday on the following charges:

• Eleven felony counts of lewd or lascivious acts upon a minor under 14 years of age.
• Four felony counts of lewd or lascivious acts upon a child age 14 or 15.
• Six felony counts of sexual penetration by foreign objects of a minor under 18.
• Two felony counts of sexual penetration by a foreign object of a minor under 16.

Kristianson faces a maximum sentence of 165 years to life in prison, plus six years and eight months in state prison, when he is sentenced. The sentencing is scheduled for March 19, 2026.

According to Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer, Kristianson abused the girls at several places in Orange County in the late '90s and mid-2000s while he worked as a sleep-away camp counselor for the South Orange County YMCA in 1999 and 2000.

He then worked as a cheer coach at the academy Magic All-Stars from 2002 to 2005 and at Trabuco Hills High School from 2004 to 2006.

Kristianson, of Antioch, Tennessee, is also charged with similar crimes in Florida.

According to Spitzer, he was arrested in Daytona Beach for allegedly "masturbating on camera to three children between the ages of 11 and 13 and touching the private parts of another 13-year-old girl."

Those victims were also cheer students of Kristianson, Spitzer said.

"For decades, Erick Kristianson used cheerleading gyms in Orange County and across the country as a kind of perverted catalog from which to select the next young girl he was going to molest," Spitzer said. "He was hiding in plain sight, a trusted coach banking on the fact that he could trust his young victims not to say anything about the abuse they were enduring."