Cheerleading "No-Cut" Controversy

Parent Cafe
121

This whole sequence of events and surrounding news coverage is a total mystery to me.

Obviously this school did not ever implement a “no cuts” policy for all cheerleaders. It just seems that the issue was with the score requirement to make the top squad.

I agree with @younghoss that there never should have been a minimum qualifying score set – or if it had been set, it should have been worded as “10 best scorers overall, and all scorers over 89” – allowing for a larger squad if tryouts had gone better than expected.

But I can’t figure out who complained when the coach did the natural thing and dug down as far as needed to assemble the numbers needd for a minimum squad.

The parents of the high scorers? Surely they would understand that the squad needed a minimum number of participants to be competitive … so it would make no sense to exclude the less capable cheerleaders if that would have left only a 6-person squad.

The parents of students who didn’t make the lower cut? What would their argument be? That the score should have been reduced even lower to allow a larger squad? Or that there should have been a second round of tryouts to allow everyone a second chance?

Or was there a series of tryouts – and perhaps some parents upset that their child was eliminated in a preliminary round, but now feel that with the lowered score the child should have been able to stay in the competition? For examplel, if a score of 80 was necessary to get past round one – and upset by a final score requirement that is lower than the qualifying requirement. (Hard for me to see how that is likely, but maybe everyone was having a bad day on for the final round)

Given the ultimate decision by the school board to rely on class year rather than tryouts to separate the upper & lower squads, I’m wondering if there is something else going on in the background that wasn’t mentioned in the press articles. Are their parent upset because their rising seniors were shut out of the upper (“black”) squad while more agile sophomores are filled those spots?

Anyway… I just think that there is more to this story than has been reported…

122

Agree with @calmom in reply #120 that there is something odd about the whole story, and that there is something going on that is relevant but not being told publicly. (And it is not really what one would think is and ordinary “cut versus no-cut” decision.)

123

[Come to think of it, our cheerleaders only cheered for men’s teams. Football and basketball, only. I’ve never seen the squad at a women’s team game, not even if they made state championships.]

That varies. D was on cheer her freshman year and they cheered both boys and girls basketball, home games only.

124

I wonder, in line with Calmom’s thinking, could the selection of lower scoring applicants not have been in exact numerical preference? In other words, might someone that scored an 80(just an example) been passed over for someone that scored 79? That would be similar to my employment example, post 117.
In a case like that, I can see reason for higher scorers and lower scorers to squawk.

125

As I discussed in post #87. It might have been necessary to lower the score to 78 to capture the right type of cheerleader (flyer, base, backspot). It is possible that opened it to 15 people with the score above 78, but the team was only needing 10. So someone may have had a score above 78, but there were already enough of that position, so they were skipped over. I don’t know, but that is one plausible explanation. This exact same scenario happened at my DD’s school when she was a freshman and not eligible for varsity. Parents of those who had a high enough score but were placed on JV complained. It effected 3 cheerleaders, they were ultimately moved up to varsity.

126

I think we agree. My point is that a school isn’t necessarily “fielding mediocre teams” or “caving” or creating “a blizzard of snowflakes” by not cutting students, they’re putting the focus where it belongs.