Come December, judges who consider the cheerleading performance of the Georgia All-Stars at the Battle Under the Big Top competition in Atlanta may face a peculiar challenge. They will have to decide not only whether the squad has the best routine but also whether it really has anything to do with cheerleading.
“We’re doing something new this year,” said Jamie Parrish, the team’s coach. For no particular reason but to provide visual impact, the 2 1/2-minute performance by his coed “all star” squad will be modeled on a highly conceptual hospital theme.
Forget pleated skirts. The girls will wear skimpy white nurses’ outfits festooned with red crosses, the boys blue surgeons’ scrubs. In place of a martial fight song, the team will cue Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine.” As for pompoms, megaphones, and, yes, actual cheers, such vestiges of another age would seem almost laughable.
“People are paying $150 a seat in Las Vegas to see the `O’ show at the Bellagio by Cirque du Soleil,” said Parrish, 33. “I’ll sit there in the audience and think, `I see a lot of the tricks they do in my gym every day.”‘
Despite the gaudiness of productions like his team’s, Parrish actually considers all this more a sport than a spectacle. He is at the vanguard of a new wave of coaches who are rendering tradition-bound cheerleading nearly unrecognizable to those who think it belongs first and foremost on the sidelines of “real” sports.
A fundamental split
At a time of year when varsity squads are attending gridiron clashes, the greater contest may be playing out within cheerleading–a battle for the soul of an American institution.
The momentum to turn competitive cheerleading into a major sport has grown so strong (even internationally, with talk of putting it in the Olympics) that the purists find themselves leading a new reactionary push, to reinforce the premise that cheerleading must actually involve … well, leading cheers.
Parrish, who is a product of the august “spirit program” at the University of South Carolina, owns an independent all-star cheerleading gym, a private clinic with no school affiliations that exists almost exclusively to train flashy acrobatic teams to compete with other such teams. He said that when he opened the gym in Marietta, Ga., in 1991, it was the only one of its kind in the Atlanta area; he now has 17 competitors. Nationally, by one recent count, the number of all-star gyms has exploded, to about 2,500 from around 200, in the last five years.
“The days of Go! Fight! Win! are completely archaic these days,” Parrish said happily.
The split is so stark, in fact, that Parrish maintains that competitive cheerleading now merits a name unto itself. “`Acroperformance’ is what I’d call it,” he said.Even traditional sideline cheerleading has evolved strikingly, in its choreography and athleticism, since the days when George W. Bush donned a varsity sweater and raised a megaphone at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.
Even though many squads, particularly at universities, have long performed such elaborate feats as basket catches out of 2-2-1 pyramids, cheerleaders were often considered little more than idealized trophy wives to men’s sports programs–conspicuously attractive, charming and well-groomed but most of all subservient.
That began to change as women redefined many of their traditional roles in the 1970s, and by the Reagan years–seemingly channeling Mary Lou Retton, the Olympic gymnastics star and even “Flashdance”–cheerleaders were incorporating even more dance, tumbling and stunts into their routines.
Beyond the cheer
In fact, it was traditional cheerleaders doing newly stunty routines who first found a national audience as an entertainment franchise. By the early 1980s, ESPN had made collegiate competitions a television staple.
It was the generation weaned on those shows, where cheerleaders themselves were the stars, that began joining all-star gyms in the late ’80s, and that ushered in the aggressively showy all-star style that has purists a bit aghast.
“A lot of people who come from all-star gyms don’t know how to cheer,” said Alan Avayou, a coach of the Temple University squad. “That’s why we’re here.”
Here, in this case, was Rutgers University’s Livingston campus in Piscataway, N.J., where the Universal Cheerleaders Association was holding its big four-day East Coast summer camp in early August. The gathering might be considered something of a boot camp, intended to drill some 500 collegiate cheerleaders in the fundamentals: “motions” (the semaphorelike arm gestures they use) and “gameplanning” (managing the morale of 60,000 fans when, say, the home team’s quarterback is injured), as well as tumbling, stunt performing and, of course, cheering.
The association’s top instructor at the camp, Bill Ahern, is no stranger to cutthroat spirit competition. In the mid-’80s, he cheered with the University of Kentucky’s powerhouse coed squad, a perennial champion.
“Even at the University of Kentucky,” he said, “the school is happy with the exposure they get at the competitions, but the real concern is, What are they doing to give us home-field advantage?”
“In the last five years,” he added, “we’ve really had to re-emphasize what a cheerleader is supposed to do.” Sometimes, he said, recruits with all-star backgrounds scarcely seem to know, or even to care, which team has the ball.
Ahern was standing on a sun-drenched football field at Rutgers. Before him, the Villanova squad unfurled a white flag the size of a spinnaker, emblazoned with a bold navy-blue “V.” The team from George Mason University in Virginia belted out “Go G.M.!” as one member jumped into a spontaneous standing back handspring, seemingly just because she could. It was purist heaven.
The `all-stars’
Not that all those present were entirely pure of heart. “I didn’t associate myself with cheerleaders,” recalled Ebony Halsell, an instructor at the camp and a cheerleader at Western Kentucky University whose only experience was on all-star squads before she got to college. “We didn’t do cheers–we did routines to music.
“All-stars wear short skirts and always have our tummies uncovered,” she said. “We’d wear glitter and wild makeup. In college, we have to live up to the alumni expectations. It’s more conservative. Red lipstick, blush, white bows.”
All the flash can help obscure the fact that all-star gyms tend to have an intense, almost Soviet, approach to training. Children (“ankle biters,” as they are called) often join the gyms–many of them reinvented gymnastics centers–in kindergarten, and continue up the competitive ladder, level by level, through college and beyond. “Open squads” attract competitors well into their 20s.
Although many all-star squads strive for an image that at least generally recalls the classic cheerleader (albeit with more skin and glitter), it is emergent competition companies such as All Star Challenge of Durham, N.C., which organizes competitions like Battle Under the Big Top, that are suddenly bursting the limits. At its annual Clash of the Titans tournament in March, cheerleaders will spin into their basket catches in front of a 20-foot-tall scale replica of the Parthenon flanked by flaming caldrons and giant heads of Zeus spitting torrents of water.
“To call it cheerleading is almost insulting,” said Dennis Worley, a managing director and the chief legal counsel at the company.
