<p>I admit it - I am prejudiced against cheer. Probably some deep seeded feeling from being a middle school geek. </p>
<p>Even now, when cheer is a “sport”, the cheerleaders - who can do amazing tumbling! - still have the reputation as the drinking, party girls. At our particular HS, I have a whole lot more respect for the dance program than I do for the cheer program.</p>
<p>Our youngest D is a retired gymnast and has always taken dance, so she’s a natural for cheer. She’s a middle school cheerleader and the gym where she takes tumbling is asking her to be on their highest level competitive team. I’d love for her to be on HS drill team but I fear she’ll want to cheer.</p>
<p>Tell me that there are smart, nice CC girls who are into cheer! Please!</p>
<p>MIT definitely does. Post your question on the MIT board and Mollie will respond. She is now the coach of the MIT cheer team while she pursues her PhD at Harvard.</p>
<p>I learned the hard way, that it’s best to let teenagers pursue the activities they want, instead of the ones we prefer. When my gymnast daughter started high school I encouraged her to try out for cheerleading because her school didn’t have a gymnastics team. She cheered for two seasons but didn’t enjoy it, and resented the time it required. She continued to compete on her club gymnastics team throughout high school, and got involved in the school newspaper instead of sports. She’s now competing on a club gymnastics team in college, and still coaches gymnastics in the summer. She does know many smart former gymnasts who made the move to competitive or school cheer, and things worked out fine for them. I’d let her do what she enjoys. You’ll both be happier.</p>
<p>Oh, I know I’ll let her do what she enjoys. But so far I haven’t liked the girls or the coaches or the other moms. (There really are “Texas Cheerleader Moms” out there. My hair isn’t blonde enough or big enough for me to qualify.)</p>
<p>The cheerleading from my day (popular, cute girls standing on sideline and cheering with pompoms) has morphed into the sport of cheer with acrobatics, tumbling, stunts, etc. I read an article once that opined that the number 1 high school sport for injuries for girls (sometimes catastrophic injuries) was cheerleading. I had no idea! I would definitely look at the safety factor at the school/program that your D is considering joining.</p>
<p>My other big problem is that the girls need to be *such good tumblers to make the HS squad, then they hardly do *anything. On the drill team, the girls have to be good dancers, then they do numerous difficult dances at pep rallies, football games and in competition. On the cheer squad, they mostly just stand at the sidelines and cheer, then prepare one routine that they do at two competitions…they hardly ever actually DO what they had to do to get on the squad.</p>
<p>D was a cheerleader freshman year. She liked it well enough, but made dance team after that so she didn’t do it again. The girls she cheered with were a very mixed group, I admit some not so nice, but many were very nice girls and many (my D included) were good students.</p>
<p>The funniest thing was the reaction of other parents. When they found out that D was a cheerleader they either were very impressed and assumed that she must be extremely popular (not true), or they made negative remarks. I didn’t really appreciate the latter. My favorite comment was when someone said “But she’s smart, isn’t she?” as if a cheerleader couldn’t be.</p>
<p>If cheer is what your D enjoys and is good at, that might be for her. I won’t hold it against you :)</p>
<p>My DD’s gymnastic coach got a college cheer scholarship :D</p>
<p>Two of my Dds cheered for a year each. One was middle school which was fine, one was an outside local group and I was not Texas enough and not excited enough to live vicariously through my DD like the other mothers ;)</p>
<p>I was a cheerleader in college and one day the athletic director came to our practice and tried to recruit us for the gymnastics team. I don’t think any of us could even do a back handspring.</p>
<p>My daughter is a cheerleader, but it’s not very competitive at our high school, either. It’s quite a mixed group of personalities so there is no real cheerleader “reputation”. We don’t have a gymnastics team, but one girl was able to compete on her own and represented our school at the state championship meet. She won one of the events.</p>
<p>I was, indeed, a cheerleader at MIT, and cellardweller is correct that I’ve been coaching the squad since last year. Maybe MIT cheerleaders are a little different, though – we tend to figure out stunts by talking out the physics involved. :)</p>
<p>Missypie…D’s HS did not have cheerleaders–so wasn’t an issue or option for her…</p>
<p>But, as indicated by Mom60…gymnasts make great divers! My gymnast D ended up competing 4 years of HS varsity diving—never even tried diving until 9th grade. Who knew!?! And our local hs team has three of D’s former gym teammates on the diving team…doing quite well!</p>
<p>Diving season was also different than football season…so maybe your D could do both!</p>
<p>I’ve tried to get D to consider diving but she took a summer diving class a few years back where she disliked the teacher and the water was too cold, so that pretty much killed that. She actually doesn’t need another thing to be interested in. This is a child who would quit school at the drop of a hat and do 16 hours a day of ECs.</p>
<p>My D did cheerleading in HS as a senior. It was considered a lettered-sport. She loved it. Her squad was a combo of dance team and stunt cheer. The school did not have a dance or drill team. The stunts were basic and appropriated for a small school cheer squad. The squad also did community service activities representing the HS, the school district and the town. When she got to college she joined the cheer squad but it was considered a “club” (no previous experience required) not a sport; which was OK with D until they started to perform stunts without following NCAA guidelines or safety standards. After one of the flyers was dropped and seriously injured H and I insisted she quit the team. I had no problem with a school’s cheer squad being a club versus a sport, bit imho they should not be stunting. . It’s too dangerous when not practiced and performed following proper protocol and standards.</p>
<p>I think it’s worth finding out what it means to be a cheerleader at the specific high school, both in terms of what the cheerleaders actually do, and what it measns socially. It may be quite different from what it was when we were in high school, and it may vary from school to school as well. For example, at my kids’ HS, cheerleaders are considered inferior to the “poms” (which appears to me to be a dance squad). For both cheerleaders and poms, though, there are social implications as well.</p>
<p>My D was on her varsity high school cheer team for 2 years. I felt the same way you do the day she came home and said she was going to cheer. I was amazed at how much work went into learning the moves and the cheers and the halftime shows. She had always been a travel soccer player and was playing on the high school soccer team when the cheerleading team invited her and some of her friends to join them. She is tiny, so she ended up being one of the “flyers”. Scared me to death to see them launch her up in the air! She never did gymnastics or dance seriously and had a lot of catching up to do. </p>
<p>On the cheer team there were some girls that were into partying, but not all of them. There was some drama, but it could have been much much worse. Actually, the local public high school has a great varsity soccer team. But, those girls were very snarky, difficult, cliquey, and partied a lot. They were very popular, but made up of a group of girls that made “Mean girls” look like a walk in the park. And then there were the soccer Moms and Dads that completed the team. Every bit as intense and scary as the cheer moms of texas. You will find intense parents everywhere. I watched some of the antics myself while my son was on the boys soccer team before he transferred to our current (small catholic) high school. The rest I heard through the parent network from my D’s travel team (she played with a few of the girls). Actually, it was their antics on the sideline that cemented my DH’s decision that he did not want her going to school there. At the end of one of the girls games, the boys took the field for their varsity game. The girls, instead of going to the locker room to change stayed on the side of the field and changed in front of the boys team and all in the stands. Right down to panties and sports bras. It was distracting for the boys and inappropriate. No one from the school reprimanded them.</p>
<p>She and her friends are very bright and focused girls. They are good and respectful of others feelings. They are not angels, but they are way better than the other high school’s girls soccer team. I would have been happy for her to cheer again last year, but she wanted something that would not take up as much time and she felt that with her music schedule she would be missing too much. The cheer team doesn’t work well when someone is missing, the stunts don’t work.</p>
<p>She will be my third child to go through the high school and I know quite a bit about the cheer program. As is often surprising to folks outside of Texas, sports - including drill team and cheer - are double blocked classes, which means that cheer would be 1/4 of all the classes she has in HS. Sort of stunning. I can live with that for my older D because I have a lot of respect for our drill team program and think it teaches the girls a lot more than just dance. But I don’t get the same feeling about the cheer squad.</p>
<p>Of course, who knows that a 13 year old will decide in a few months. She already doesn’t want to do the private cheer team because found out she’d have to give up tap dance (meets on the same night.)</p>