By Charlotte Smith

Ditch the pom-poms and megaphones. You have just entered the world of rhinestones, fake hair, and an extensive collection of bows, better known to the world as competitive cheerleading.

When someone hears the word “cheerleading,” they might think of a mean, popular girl in high school who wears her uniform to school every day and dates the most popular and athletic boy on the football team. This is the typical cheerleading stereotype portrayed in almost every high high school movie or television show. These characters participate in sideline cheer, which is quite different from competitive, or all-star cheer. 

Sideline cheer encompasses cheering for a team, such as football or basketball, and the cheerleaders’ main goal is to engage fans and encourage the team to play hard. Competitive cheer is not cheering on another team but instead involves performing routines against other cheer teams, where they are judged by a panel of cheerleading experts based on difficulty and execution of tumbling skills, stunts, flexibility, synchronicity, and facial expressions. In the 4th grade, I began my cheer career as a sideline cheerleader. In 5th grade, I made the switch to competitive cheerleading and continued with it until the end of my freshman year. 

Top Gun Large Coed’s stunt sequence. Photo credit: Top Gun Cheer and Dance.

A competitive cheerleading routine is two and a half minutes long and packed with sequences consisting of stunts, tumbling, baskets, jumps, a pyramid, and a dance. The music is customized to each team with voice-overs that mention the team’s name and titles. The music is composed of remixes from other songs and has timed-out sound effects for specific parts of the routine, such as the jump sequence. Many different elements must be considered when building a routine, including formations, sequences, flow, overall look, technique, and difficulty. 

Cheer competitions are truly indescribable unless you experience one for yourself. Imagine standing in a large arena or convention center, with the prominent smell of hairspray, while you walk through a sea of girls, fueled by hundreds of Pixie-sticks, wearing sparkly, rhinestoned uniforms, large bows, accompanied with teased hair and hair extensions. 

Once you dodge the thousands of glitter cheer bags, girls taking pictures, parents wearing the utmost tackiest “Cheer Dad” and “Cheer Mom” shirts, moms fixing their child’s hair, coaches counting their athletes, teams stretching, long food lines, and the occasional cheerleader meltdown to make it to the performance arena, you are faced with a bigger-than-life stage where teams will perform. Thirty feet back from the stage is a high-raised platform of seats where anywhere from 12 to 15 judges sit. 

Cheer Extreme, Senior Elite’s pyramid. Photo credit: Lindsay Perry, Flo Cheer.

Competitions are scored on a 100-point scale and have three scoring categories: building skills, tumbling skills, and overall routine. Coaches and choreographers’ goal is to create the most difficult routine possible so that they can maximize the points earned in difficulty, but more difficult routines run the risk of something going wrong: a stunt falling, a tumbling pass-fail, or another error. 

At competitions, most placements come down to whether a team had point deductions or not. Deductions are points taken off from the score when things are not done properly. The goal is to execute the routine with no deductions. If this is accomplished, the team has “Hit Zero.” Teams that win hardly ever have any deductions.

When awards are announced, the difference between first, second, and even third, often comes down to hundredths of a point. While a team may hit zero, small errors in technique and performance add up. Things such as not having your toes pointed, your legs not being straight, your feet being apart after your tumbling pass, or your smile dropping, is enough to make the difference between winning and losing. 

Winning World’s 2019! Photo credit: Eunderwoood25 via Wikipedia.

The typical cheer season is 12 months long, with competitions starting in late fall and ending in May. Throughout the season, most teams average anywhere from six to ten competitions. The Majors, NCA (National Cheerleading Association), Worlds, and Summit are the most sought-after competitions where teams must compete throughout the season to earn a bid to these more prestigious competitions. Bids are hard to come by, as each competition must be registered with Varsity, the global authority for competitive cheerleading, and teams must have the highest score of their whole level to earn the bid. Some competitions only award one to three bids, making earning one an extreme achievement. 

Cheer Athletics Cheetahs, team basket tosses. Photo credit: Inside Cheerleading.

Competitive cheerleading is an investment, in both time and money. There is a fee for everything, and I mean everything. To begin the season, you have to pay a try-out fee. Once you make the team, you then pay monthly gym tuition, purchase a uniform, a bow, team make-up, practice shoes, and then of course the extras, including warm-up jackets, practice apparel, t-shirts, a cheer bag, extra bows, and even fake-hair pieces, made of real human hair, to match your hair color to prevent damaging your real hair on competition days. 

Aside from accessories come the logistical costs. Each competition requires a fee, and then you must factor in travel costs: hotels, gas, flights, food. To increase your skills and to make it to higher levels of teams, athletes need to increase their tumbling skills, which requires tumbling classes and countless numbers of private lessons. Team practices go late into the night, and competitions often fill an entire weekend. 

Because of the commitment, families must make sure that their child truly loves their sport. This isn’t an issue for most cheerleaders, because something about the thrill of performing a perfect routine makes all of the training, conditioning, and hard practices worth it. At large, popular gyms, with highly respected teams, some families of the gym will even serve as host families for other athletes from different parts of the country so that they can come and be on a particular team. Many athletes will train at their local cheer gyms until they have reached the age that they can compete on famous Worlds teams. When they reach this age, they will move to live with host families, or in extreme cases, an athlete’s whole family will move to a new state to accommodate for their child’s chance to be on their dream team. Cheerleaders will move away from their families as young as 13 years old to pursue their cheerleading careers. 

Many people underestimated the world of competitive cheerleading until 2020, when Netflix released Cheer, a documentary-style show following the world-renowned junior college, Navarro, on their journey to winning Daytona Nationals. This isn’t the first time Netflix has launched a show on competitive cheerleading. In 2016, Netflix released Cheer Squad (Netflix clearly has a creative team naming these shows). This show followed the Canadian Team, The Great Whites, on their journey to win their third consecutive World’s title.  

Navarro Cheer Team. Photo credit: Corsicana Daily Sun.

Cheerleading encompasses the true meaning of teamwork. Throwing people into the air and flipping alongside one another is thrilling and looks amazing when executed correctly, but one misstep, one count off, and one mistake, can cause a stunt to fall, a tumbling collision, and an array of broken bones, concussions, and even missing teeth. While being on a cheer team was an extreme time commitment, I think one of my biggest regrets is quitting the sport. 

I miss the thrill of competing, traveling, trying to earn bids, and gaining new skills. Competitive cheerleading provided me with a new outlet, different from that of my peers at school, and allowed me to meet an entirely new group of people. After my team earned a bid and competed at Summit in May 2019, I decided that I could no longer commit to both cheerleading and three seasons of Collegiate varsity sports, so I decided to hang up my uniform and cheer shoes. I wish that I had continued pursuing the cheerleading venture, as it was an unforgettable opportunity and experience.

Cheer Athletics Cheetahs, team pyramid. Photo credit: Inside Cheerleading.