Under a clear, moonless autumn sky, Stillwater High School’s football team scores a touchdown against their archrivals and the crowd goes wild, hollering and clapping and stamping their feet. From somewhere in the stands, a lone voice shouts, “Go! Fight! Win!” as a handful of red helium-filled balloons disappears into the dark sky.
It is a typical Saturday night at a high school football game in the middle of America, except for one thing: Stillwater doesn’t have a cheerleader in sight.
Somewhere along the line, cheerleading lost its cool, Stillwater disbanded its squad and, for the first time ever, opened football season without a pompom or a pep rally or a pretty face to hype the crowds and cheer on the boys.
Stillwater isn’t alone: Traditional cheerleading is beginning to die out at high schools across the country. In some schools, the activity has reinvented itself as a fiercely competitive athletic event in its own right at at a time when girls’ sports in general are taking off.
Forget popularity contests, sideline cheers, cookie-baking for the football players, pompoms. Competitive cheerleaders are required to move with the grace of ballet dancers and the strength and aerial agility of professional acrobats. As they restyle the form, they are commanding fresh legions of supporters who respect their athletic prowess.
These “competitive spirit squads” don’t lead cheers or even support a particular sports team, but rather exist to tumble, stunt, dance and compete.
Nationally, the number of cheerleaders has dropped from 143,909 in the 1993-94 school year to 130,984 in 1998-99, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. At the same time, participation in competitive spirit squads has almost tripled.
“Competitive cheer has been growing by about 5 percent a year, coaches are better trained, and there is more TV coverage than ever,” said Bill Patterson, a vice president of the National Spirit Group Ltd., which sells cheerleading accessories and runs summer training camps around the nation.
Changes in cheerleading are a reflection of deeper social changes spurred by Title IX, the federal regulation requiring equal spending on male and female school athletics. It took more than two decades, but girls are finally on par with boys, according to athletic directors at high schools around the nation. There are more girls teams than ever, greater emphasis on competition, and the highest levels of athletic participation in history.
“It used to be that girls could only do ballet and synchronized swimming and cheering, but Title IX blew the doors open, making so many sports, so many forms of physical expression, available to them,” said Meg Campbell, who lectures at Harvard University and directs its Outward Bound Collaborative. “Girls want to make history, not watch it being made.”
A decade ago, Stillwater had dozens of cheerleaders, but the number dwindled to a handful this year, said Sherman Danielson, the high school’s athletic director. Ironically, the squad was discontinued in a town that is less than an hour from the University of Minnesota, where organized cheerleading was born in 1898, when Jack Campbell, a first-year medical student, began to rally crowds at football games.
Danielson said girls sports are so popular, there are now 70 players on the girls tennis team and 60 on the soccer team. Their swim team is ranked fourth in the state.
“There are tons of girls in sports, everybody has a sport,” said Tara Jameson, a Stillwater junior who plays softball and swims competitively. “But we don’t see cheerleading as a sport because there are no games or competitions.”
Jameson’s friend Abby Heger, a soccer player, said: “You want to be in a sport to prove yourself. People look at cheerleaders as ditsy or snobby, and girls at Stillwater don’t want to project that image.”
And the boys don’t appear to want them to either:
“Our girls sports are extremely good, and that’s why we don’t have cheerleaders,” said student Andy Hueller. “I think it’s a good sign.”
More cheerleading squads likely will meet the fate of Stillwater’s if they don’t make a transition to sport, say competitive cheer coaches and sports authorities. The popularity of teams that have elevated their practice to sport, incorporating competition and losing some of their traditional trappings, is skyrocketing.
At Longwood High School in Long Island, N.Y., the popularity of competitive cheerleading is “huge, it is mega,” said coach Donna Beary, whose school has several squads and whose varsity team competes — and regularly wins — championships around the country.
“My girls are the best athletes in the school by far,” she said. “The boys see them as athletes and respect them. They are heavily recruited by other sports teams in the spring because they are so strong. It’s not about putting on glitter makeup, standing on the sidelines and looking pretty.”
Competitive spirit squad members run, lift weights and do full conditioning and strengthening programs, as well as gymnastics training, to prepare them to “tumble” and “stunt.” Their repertoire includes back flips with a twist and cartwheel roundoffs with a back handspring — semi-Olympian feats.
“Moving away from entertainment into sport involves having your physical skills tested,” said Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation in East Meadow, N.Y. “It means going up against other teams in a competitive setting, not performing at halftime at the football game.”
Cheerleading for its own sake might sound odd, but for people like Brandi Mourid, who has been on one squad or another since she was 6 years old, there is nothing like it.
“There is no other way to get the energy and the spark outside competing,” said 15-year-old Mourid, who is a member of an elite all-star cheerleading team called Thunder, in Pasadena, Md. “It’s not like you are out there cheering someone else on; the spotlight is on you and your team. You look into the bright lights and you have one shot to do it right. It’s intense.”
In some ways, high school cheerleading is going through changes already made on the collegiate level, which began the shift to a more competitive athletic activity a decade ago. Participation at the National Cheerleading Association championships has increased more than 100 percent since 1995, according to Bill Boggs, association vice president.
“Athleticism is playing a big part in the entertainment value of the spirit industry,” Boggs said.
In the early ’90s, many large cheerleading competitions began to require gymnastics and tumbling, according to Shelley Wayne, assistant director and choreographer of America’s first drill team, the Kilgore College Rangerettes of Texas. At the same time, she said, a trend toward dance with salsa and swing at its roots began to spread, prompting another major shift in cheerleading on the high school level.
To be sure, cheerleading, particularly in the South, is still a big deal. And earning a spot on the squad is considered a social coup for many young women.
But even in the Lone Star State, where cheerleading can approach the fervor of a religion, drill teams that don’t use their voices, rarely appear with pompoms, and move in synchronized steps to pounding dance rythms, are outstripping the popularity of traditional cheerleading squads, Wayne said.
At Seaholm High School in Birmingham, Mich., only three people came to cheerleading tryouts this year.
“They suspended cheerleading and replaced it with the dance team,” said Karen Holmquist, a former cheerleader and a senior at Seaholm. “It was a shock when we first found out.”
Holmquist thought cheerleading might have lived on if it had taken an athletic turn.
“The whole thing kind of fell apart,” she said. “I think it would have been different if we had a team that went competitive.
“Cheerleading is a sport,” Holmquist said. “It’s just as hard as soccer, which I used to play. But to the spectator it just looks like all you are doing is cheering on the boys, and that’s not a cool thing to do anymore.
“What’s cool is to be on a team yourself. You get more respect as a competitor going against other teams, trying to beat an opponent.”
