cheerleading

cheerleading, team activity in which elements of dance and acrobatics are combined with shouted slogans in order to entertain spectators at sporting events and to encourage louder and more enthusiastic cheering. Once exclusively a sideline activity geared toward supporting school sports, cheerleading has gained recognition as a sport in its own right and often operates outside the school context altogether. Cheerleading has long been considered an iconic American activity symbolizing school spirit, leadership, youthfulness, and sex appeal. The southern United States (including Texas) is usually considered the heart of modern cheerleading, although the activity is well established throughout the United States as well as abroad, having gained a foothold in countries around the world.

History of cheerleading

Although cheerleading is today predominantly associated with femininity, the original cheerleaders were men. Cheerleading was connected to the emergence of gridiron football at Ivy League colleges and universities in the United States in the mid-1800s, and the growth and formalization of cheerleading paralleled that of football. Over the latter half of the 19th century, as attendance at college games grew, large stadiums were constructed, and spectators were distanced from the playing field. Cheerleaders—or “yell leaders,” as they were then called—led cheers from the sidelines both to encourage the spectators and to serve as a form of crowd control. By the 1920s cheerleading had become a formal extracurricular activity for boys in high schools, colleges, and communities across the country, related to but distinct from other spirit programs such as marching bands, drum corps, and drill teams. As ambassadors for their schools and communities, cheerleaders were associated with such character-building traits as discipline, cooperation, leadership, and sportsmanship.

Women and people of colour were excluded from the private all-male schools where collegiate sports and cheerleading first developed, but many state-supported institutions began to admit women at the turn of the century, opening the way for their participation in sporting events. Women began joining cheer squads during the 1920s and ’30s as collegiate sports proliferated and men and women began socializing more in public. A separate cheerleading tradition evolved within black educational institutions during the same period, with a similar emphasis on character building and leadership. Overall, however, cheerleading remained an overwhelmingly white enterprise, and evidence suggests that it became even “whiter” after desegregation, because the total number of black schools diminished and black students were rarely elected as cheerleaders in the newly integrated, predominantly white schools. It was not until the 1960s and ’70s, well after scholastic athletic programs had diversified, that cheer squads began to reflect the ethnic and racial composition of schools. That shift was in part the result of protest activity on the part of black and Latino students.

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The mobilization of college-age men during World War II opened up new opportunities for women in cheerleading and ultimately led to the “feminization” of cheerleading in the 1960s and ’70s, when the proportion of female cheerleaders rose to roughly 95 percent. Female involvement changed the nature of cheerleading, spurring greater emphasis on physical attractiveness and sex appeal. That, in turn, may have led to the trivialization and devaluation of cheerleading.

Cheerleading experienced a decline in popularity in the late 1970s and ’80s, brought on by second-wave feminism, which challenged traditional ideas about gender roles, and by the passage of Title IX, which guaranteed girls and women equal access to sports in schools that received U.S. federal funds. Cheerleading was criticized for its supportive auxiliary function in men’s sporting events and thus was blamed for perpetuating gender inequality. The introduction of cheerleading squads for professional sports teams, such as the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and the Laker Girls, fueled criticism, since those squads’ performances generally consisted of overtly sexualized dance routines.

The cheerleading renaissance

The decline of cheerleading was short-lived, however, and it soon rebounded to become more popular and more profitable than ever before. The reasons for its recovery included the increasingly athletic nature of cheerleading and the adoption of sportlike elements such as competitions, summer training camps, and rigorous practice schedules. Most cheerleading squads no longer simply led cheers or danced on the sidelines. They also performed jumps and stunts, built pyramids, and executed elaborate tumbling passes, whether at sporting events or in cheerleading competitions. Those changes served to make cheerleading more appealing for a generation of girls and women who had more options for athletic involvement than past ones, and they led to a resurgence of male participation, particularly at the college level. The introduction of difficult acrobatics was not without drawbacks, however; studies in the first decade of the 21st century showed that cheerleading had become the leading cause of catastrophic sports injuries (meaning serious injuries to the brain or spine) to American girls and women, ahead of gymnastics and track.

Although the notion of competition was not new—interscholastic high-school contests were organized as early as 1944—from the 1990s there was an increasing emphasis on competition relative to other dimensions of cheerleading. The rapid rise of all-star cheerleading in the late 1990s was both a cause and a consequence of that development. All-star clubs are private for-profit programs where children as young as six years old receive intensive instruction in cheerleading, including gymnastics. They compete with other all-star cheer clubs within their own extensive network of competitions. As a nonscholastic site for learning cheerleading skills, all-star programs initially served as a training ground for high-school and college cheer programs but soon became popular in their own right.

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The first college cheerleading championship was televised in 1978, with several more following in the early 1980s. Since then, cable networks have broadcast a wide range of cheer championships to national and international audiences, and competitive cheerleading has been the focus of Hollywood films, reality TV shows, and news reports.

None of that could have happened without the growth and involvement of the modern cheerleading industry. In all parts of the United States, squads are affiliated with different cheerleading companies, or associations, which run competitions, summer camps, coaching clinics, safety certification seminars, and their own product lines for uniforms and apparel. The “founding father” of that industry, Lawrence Herkimer, was himself a cheerleader at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In 1948 Herkimer started the National Cheerleaders Association (NCA), which is headquartered in Dallas, and the younger but larger Universal Cheerleaders Association (UCA) is based in Memphis.

Contemporary cheerleading

Cheerleading remains “feminine” not only in terms of its supportive sideline function but also in the performance and appearance demands placed on women: short skirts, hair ribbons, and makeup and the expectation to smile constantly and express enthusiasm. Competitive cheerleading is even more highly feminized than sideline cheerleading insofar as there is a heightened emphasis on showmanship and performativity. Although there are stylistic variations among the cheerleading companies that oversee competitions, competition routines are typically loud, fast, and energetic. They exude glitz, glamour, and glitter, particularly in the all-star context: bows are extra large, makeup is extra sparkly, and dance moves are brash and sexy.

Since the 1990s, “alternative” forms of cheerleading have emerged alongside the mainstream variants discussed above. An extensive national network of adult LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) teams (modeled after Cheer San Francisco, the oldest and largest) perform at community and gay pride events, and “radical cheerleaders,” groups of young feminist activists, use cheerleading as a vehicle for protesting social injustice. Although less popular and less visible than mainstream cheerleading, such alternative groups similarly use the energy, spirit, and performativity of cheerleading to communicate with and influence audiences.