Is cheerleading a sport?
That question can lead to heated debate. And this October the state of California decided that, yes, cheerleading is a sport, or at least will become one during the 2017-18 season.
The news is welcomed within the community as an opportunity to bring more attention to cheerleading and open the door for improvements, especially in safety and coaching.
But there is a degree of wait-and-see with this news because of how Bill No. 949 outlines these future cheerleading competitions. As it is defined in this new legislation, this future cheerleading sport is an entirely new creation, not what competitive cheer is by definition today.
Cheerleading’s history goes back more than 100 years, according to the International Cheer Union, tied to the origins of some of the country’s oldest sports, primarily football.
Princeton University and Rutgers University played the first collegiate football game on Nov. 6 1869 in New Brunswick, N.J., before several hundred spectators, unlikely aware of history they were witnessing. Rutgers won the contest 6-4.
A little more than a decade later, Princeton students formed an all-male “pep club” to provide cheers or unified chants during football games from the stands, much like today’s modern student sections.
In 1884, Thomas Peebles, a Princeton grad, relocated to Minnesota and introduced the concept of “pep clubs” to the midwest at the University of Minnesota and it quickly stuck.
By 1889 “pep clubs” had spread to several other schools, but cheering or “school yells” was still regulated to the stands. In October of 1889, Minnesota was on a three-game losing streak and the school newspaper implored the fans for a plan to inspire enthusiasm against rival Northwestern.
That plan was for a handful of male students or “yell leaders” to lead the chants from the sidelines with megaphones. As the school’s paper, the Ariel, wrote: “These men would see to it that everybody leaves the park today breathless and voiceless, as this is the last game here, it ought to be a revelation to the people of Minnesota in regard to University enthusiasm.”
Minnesota won the game 17-6 and cheerleading was born.
Over the next hundred years cheerleading began to shape into what it is today. At first cheerleading was dominated by males, but the University of Minnesota was once again the pioneer, rolling out the first female cheerleaders in 1923. In the 1940s, World War II gave women the opportunity to become the primary participants with the nation’s men at war. Today 90 percent of cheerleaders are female.
By the 1970s the skills used in cheerleading spiked with the introduction of partner stunts and things such as pyramids as well as tumbling. And in 1975 the first cheerleading routine (with music) was demonstrated at a cheer camp at the University of Memphis.
Cheerleading kept growing and growing, reaching an international level from Japan to the United Kingdom; the first World Cheerleading Championship were held in 2004. From a couple of young men trying to snap a losing streak, more than a century later cheerleading was now a global phenomenon.
On Oct. 7, a new step for cheerleading emerged when California announced that Bill No. 949 had been signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, putting cheerleading on the path to becoming a sport on the same level of basketball or baseball in California by 2017.
Something brand new
There are a couple of problems for cheerleading in the “Is it a sport?” debate, starting with Title IX, the 1972 federal law that dictates equal opportunities for men and women in athletics.
In 2010 a federal judge ruled that competitive cheer is not an official sport that could be used by colleges to meet Title IX’s gender-equity regulations. That decision was upheld in 2012 in a federal appeals court. And while the court agreed that the elements of cheerleading required athleticism found in the sport, it just didn’t have enough structure yet.
“Like the district court, we acknowledge record evidence showing that competitive cheerleading can be physically challenging, requiring competitors to po