- Feb 4, 2010
- 482
- 592
Or, it's about the venue and meeting their criteria. The Summit has a plethora of teams/divisions to give bids to (Disney translation: amount of multi-day park hoppers they want for the venue) but, World's is a different story. No doubt when the Disney-Varsity partnership was formed and the new building was built, Varsity had to meet economic criteria (park hoppers) for each of Summit, Dance World's, Cheer World's, and D2 weekends . From a fan perspective, I'm right there with everyone that would prefer seeing a handful of divisions battle it out. From solely a business perspective, I can see how Cheer World's would have the smallest population and the hardest time meeting economic criteria. More divisions=more park hoppers. When I was a buyer we used to say, "Welcome to Groveling and Sorcery 101, where you rely on everyone else's businesses to get your job done, but you still have to meet dates/deadlines, cost and profit margin." I imagine EP's and buyers have a lot in common.
Move Worlds out of Disney World already if it’s not a big enough event to please Disney. Lol if only. Plenty of venues would gladly host a competition that attracts teams from all parts of the globe. Disney is lucky a sport’s World Championships even wants to compete there.
But these new divisions aren’t even going to add many teams to Worlds as much as they will just further dilute the already existing playing field. The number of Level 6 teams isn’t growing— it’s shrinking/stagnating (and weakening with more teams doing NT or struggling to field a 12-person XS team), in part because of the heavy emphasis on Summit. Plenty of athletes don’t bother getting to Level 6 anymore because they can get a trip to Florida/Disney at the end of the season whether they’re on Level 6 or Level 3. We give Level 1 teams rings just like we give rings to the World Champions, and have kids believing they’re on top of the world for winning Level 4. It’s no coincidence that Level 6 participation has stagnated/decreased at the same time as the Summit has become popular (before Summit existed, we had “All-Levels Championships” events, which were more low-key). But I digress.
The point is, they keep adding more Level 6 divisions, but there’s no big increase in Level 6 teams to go along with it. It’s already very difficult to find competition in Level 6. The last thing we need are more divisions.
The claim that we need “Limited” divisions because XS has been overrun by the huge gyms is false and a pretty weak excuse to add more divisions. The gyms that have been doing well in XS are regular, normal-sized gyms. A “Mega” gym location may enter this division if they have “leftovers” that don’t fit on another team (I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get what I mean). But no Mega gym’s main team is XS. And the XS divisions would be extremely weak (aka not Worlds-worthy) if you removed every gym that has more than 1 Worlds team. Breaking down a division this way doesn’t even make sense because a team isn’t inherently at an advantage just because there’s another Level 6 team in their program.
If a small gym of 100 athletes wants to claim it’s at a huge disadvantage in Level 6, fine, but these new divisions AREN’T Small Gym divisions, they are divisions for any size gym to hide from the competition in their actual division. And I agree that the name “Limited” is terrible because that’s what Coed divisions used to be called, and it doesn’t emphasize the fact that these are lesser B versions of already existing divisions.
Making everyone a winner in cheer will only work until a certain point, then it will start to chase serious athletes away into other sports. You can make everyone a “National Champion”, but if you start to cheapen a World title too, kids are going to stop caring so much about winning it and will just do a more serious sport instead. It’s already been happening.
Last edited: