Cheerleading Essay

More Than the Pom-Pom’s and Skirts The Discourse Community that I am a part of is the Lake High School Cheerleading Team. I was on Varsity for all four years of high school for football and basketball seasons. We are not your typical high school cheerleading team however; we stunt, tumble, and compete. We break the status quo of being dumb blondes and we work hard to be the athletes that we are. The crisis of the Lake High School Cheerleading Team is the stereotypes that our high school students and administration makes towards us. This crisis is important because we, as cheerleaders, take offense when people tell us that we are something we are not. We are tired of having these false accusations made towards us, so we want to let our audience

In Amy Moritz’s article, “Cheerleading: Not Just for Sidelines Anymore,” also explains this by saying, “For decades, female athletes were relegated to the sidelines - physically and metaphorically speaking. The cheerleader, the girl who looked pretty and cheered for the boys, became a symbol for many women's sports activists and second-wave feminists of the place athletically inclined females occupied in the sport world” (660). This quote from Moritz proves that the students and administration in my high school didn’t come up with these stereotypes by themselves and it also explains how cheerleaders are stereotyped as girls who only cheer for the skirt and for attention from males. This quote ties into my thesis because these examples are how the students and administration in my high school think of us. The Lake High School Cheerleading team is breaking this stereotype by cheering competitively. In this competitive routine, we have to tumble, dance, cheer, jump and sometimes stunt to music for two minutes and 30 seconds straight without stopping. To be able to do this, we condition daily, go to private tumbling classes to improve our tumbling skills individually and as a squad, and we also practice many times during the week to perfect the routine. It takes great athletic ability to be able to perform a

My discussion about males being on the team is in fact addressing the larger matter of the students of our high school making the assumption that males that are on a cheer team are homosexual. In Laura Grindstaff’s article, “Cheerleading and the Gendered Politics of Sports,” she says that male cheerleaders don’t want to be perceived as homosexual, so they don’t participate in the feminine parts of cheerleading. In my opinion, this quote upsets me because it seems as if Grindstaff believes that male cheerleaders that would dance or cheer along with the girls would be homosexual. This example could be tied into the issue that there was with a male who wanted to try out for our cheerleading team. He did end up making the team because he was a good cheerleader and he had great assets that would make our team better, but he had to quit because he was being harassed and bullied by other students in our high school who told him and others that “he must be gay if he is going to be on the cheer team.” I think that Grindstaff and the students in my high school are completely wrong with associating male cheerleading and being homosexual together. It takes great strength and athletic ability to be both a female and a male cheerleader. This example of the stereotype can also be applied to my thesis statement because this crisis is important to me and has