What is cheer? Is it a sport?
Cheerleading is a physical activity that combines dance, acrobatics, vocal chants, and performance to encourage sports teams. That may make it difficult to list as a sport or activity, but all girls and boys are considered athletes when cheerleading. If someone is an athlete, and they are performing athletically, then they are playing a sport.
Cheerleading is a sport.
There are two different types of cheer: competition and sideline.
Competition cheer is when a team goes to a competition and performs a two-minute and thirty second routine, then they are judged and scored.
Then, sideline cheer is when a team has practice every day, like every school sport, and practices stunts, chants, and dances to perform at a school basketball game.
At Sutton High School, they have a cheer team that falls under sideline, but the team also occasionally does a game-day competition.
The coach at Sutton is Ms. Kari Farmer. She is the librarian at the school and coaches the cheer team after school.
What Ms. Farmer does during practice is teach the choreography, spacing, stunts, and new cheers for the team to do during the games and throughout the season. Then, while she instructs, the cheer team works on making this ready for a performance during a game.
She doesn’t just do the routines for the team, but also makes bows and signs for them to use during games.
What goes into the choreography? A lot of thought goes into dancing for the team and making the cheers unique and their own. Ms. Farmer takes time to figure out what looks good and lets the members of the team have their input, and is always willing to change things around.
Routines fall into the same category as choreography because they involve dancing, but additional elements are added such as flags, signs, and body language.
Everything that goes into these routines and choreography can roughly take around a week, or more, because of spacing, attendance, and learning where to go and what to do.
Pom poms are a major part of cheerleading. This is because they use them during dances and chants. Holding poms is very simple until motions are added. In the middle of the pom poms, there is a short bar, and all that is done to hold it is to grab that and then adjust the plastic parts that make it a pom pom.
Stretching is crucial for cheerleaders. At the beginning of practice, as in any other sport, they take time to stretch and warm up. Taking out mats is something that goes at the beginning of practice before they stretch, tumble, and stunt.
Overall, a lot of things go into cheerleading behind the scenes.
