What is cheerleading like

Allstar teams are affiliated with gyms that may be solely dedicated to cheer or teams may be formed at gymnastics gyms. Allstar teams are dedicated to performing a 2 minute 30 seconds routine in front of a panel of judges. Most gyms will allow any child to enroll given that his or her parents are willing to meet the financial and time commitment requirements. The majority allow children to enroll at age three or four, with a few beginning at age two.

The team s onto which an athlete is placed depends largely on his or her tumbling abilities, so most gyms evaluate children individually and sometimes in a group setting.

Each defined level of allstar cheer requires at least a majority of team members to perform particular skills during a routine. Prep cheer is a type cheerleading that offers an alternative to traditional allstar cheer. It is fairly new, having been established in the last few years, but most allstar programs offer it as an entry level option. Prep is definitely a lower commitment form of allstar cheer that requires less in terms of money, time and travel.

Most prep programs have a shorter competition season, which sometimes means that athletes can join mid-year. Prep competition routines can be as intricate as those of their allstar counterparts. Athletes are required to perform for two minutes and prep rules only allow for limited, less advanced, stunting.

Routines still must include choreographed dancing, cheering, tumbling and stunting and are usually judged to the same standards as the allstar routines. On the other hand, there are only three difficulty levels of prep cheer while traditional allstar has six levels. Just like most varsity sports, cheerleading is physically exhausting. Cheerleaders also compete at regional, state and national competitions. Cheerleaders spend their entire lives training to be part of a squad.

Cheer is not for the faint of heart. In practice, someone is always getting hurt. Cheer is a very dangerous sport because there are so many ways you can get hurt. A base is the person standing on the ground holding or catching the flyer s. Stunting, lifting flyers into the air so they can do their routines, is one of the most dangerous parts of cheer.

If someone is a base, they have to be very careful. The main reason being, you are supporting the weight of the flyer and if you drop them, they can get seriously hurt.

On the outside we might just look like a bunch of pretty girls dancing around in short skirts with a pair of pom-poms, but cheer is so much more than that. Cheer was a serious and important part of my life for five years. It was one of the hardest things I ever did. However, it was also one of the best experiences of my life. Cheer means so many things to so many different people.

Not only do they become your best friends, they become your family. Cancel reply. Cheerleading comes with an abundance of narrative conflict built in. It consists of intricately constructed performances but favors those who can retain a sense of spontaneity and unself-consciousness.

Physically, cheerleading requires a surreal mix of rigidity and flexibility, control and heedlessness. In a perfect routine, trouble and weakness are entirely hidden, meaning that extraordinary performances require extraordinary deceptions, both of the cheerleader herself and of the audience. In that series, the deceptions inherent to cheering become lush, dark, sexual, and violent; the angular, knowing excellence of the cheerleaders—their crisp, clean-lined uniforms, their easy bravado—provides the thematic backdrop to a murder mystery.

The unspoken premise is that this practice, as long as it lasts, can turn you into the person that other people see—a leader who never breaks a sweat, a blinding ray of sunshine, an essential piece of a historic victory, a boy or girl beating the odds. There are times, watching the Netflix series, when that premise, or promise, almost seems to work.

By Jia Tolentino. Wurtzel lived out an advance trajectory of what might happen when your writing career centers on your charisma and the strong feelings that people tend to have about young women.