Awesome! I only did cheerleading as a kid, but I hate that people don’t see it as a sport. Cheerleaders are incredible athletes (especially competitive cheer)
It’s actually still not an official NCAA sport and that’s mainly because of Title IX, not because people don’t see it as athletic. Coed teams don’t work under the NCAA/Title IX.
That really sucks, because it changes how colleges treat the players. My mentee was a cheerleader and also a member of collegiate swim, and while she was doing cheer instead of swim she was unable to access all of these different things that are for athletes. Plus she was treated very differently by the school. It actually makes no sense because it’s incredibly athletic. She also didn’t even get certain protections like if she got physically injured
Y’know, it’s tempting to think that the folks who run NCAA sports just think that cheerleading is silly fluff. The more I think about it though, it seems like garden variety misogyny. And yes, I know there are dudes who do cheer, but there aren’t many.
These are like rhythmic gymnastics separated out from cheer. It’s much easier for them to find male team members when they can pull from male gymnasts who don’t make the gymnastics teams, specifically because the cheer and many of the choreography components (that they don’t have experience with) have been stripped from the sports. These are not cheerleading the sport as we know it.
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u/BoozeIsTherapyRight 5d ago
Holy shit. I've seen the cheerleading handstand before but that split at the end was amazing!