Questions In Cheering In General

[emax13]

Hello Fierce Board

Nice to meet all of you here. I am obviously new here but am interested by competitive cheerleading, largely because misunderstood sports like this one have always fascinated me and I have found it quite intriguing how it has evolved into something of a daredevil sport from what it once was.

You know I used to not be interested in cheerleading as competition, and yes, when I was younger I thought of the idea of cheer as anything other than little girls looking pretty on the sidelines was a joke, but this has changed dramatically havin g seen how drastically it's changed. Now it's unfair that most poeple don't view it as a serious sport in the sense of soccer, hockey, wrestling and boxing, (and if anything, more demanding than mainstream sports i.e. football, basketball and baseball). I am sure competitive cheerleaders everywhere were outraged when in the ESPN rankings of the hardest sports it was only ranked 50th. I admit to not knowing a whole lot about it but I can tell it is a hell of a lot more physically demanding and harder to master than basketball, tennis, baseball and Lacrosse and what not. SO hopefully it gets a lot more respect in the future.

However, I still had some things I was curious with regards to All Star cheering, as it is something of a new phenomenon. It seems it only became popular in mid 2000s or something, and a lot of the all star teams are new. Are all all star teams like Cheer Dynasty and American Cheer high school aged kids doing high school level stunts ? Or are there any all star teams of collegiate age kids who to stunts like what you would see in big college teams like U of Hawaii or Louisville or Kentucky ?

Thanks for any response you may have

From

emax13

 

[CheerDadof2]

All-star cheer starts at the Tiny level 1 (typically 4 yrs old) and goes to International Open level 6 (typically mid 20's).

If you look on YouTube you'll find all sorts of videos showing the different skills levels and teams competing at them. The Worlds competition you see on ESPN, which starts at Senior L5, has competitors as young as 12.

On Youtube - look up Bangkok Worlds 2011 as an example of an IO team. Look up the 2011-2012 World Cup Twinkles to see what the younger all-stars aspire too, Twinkles was a Youth(all under 11) Level 5 team that competed last year.

Oh and I believe all-star started in the early to mid 90's but really took off in the early 2000 and went more mainstream with Worlds being televised on ESPN.

There's a lot more to all-star cheerleading then just level 5 teams.

Hope this helps