High School Why Are Coed Squads Rare In High School?

[Kentucky Girl]

There are many great coed high school squads that do collegiate-like routines such as Graves County, Bartow, Lewisville, Dyer County and many others but for the most part, coed high school squads are a rarity compared to college. Thoughts?

 

[Sterling von Shimmer]

You can’t get the boys interested. And even if you can, you need boys who are mentally and emotionally there as well as physically there. It’s not enough to be able to toss a girl around. You have to understand the showmanship and performance aspects and a lot of boys are embarrassed to do that because it’s “girly.” There’s a certain maturity that comes with being a male cheerleader and your random HS boys without a lick of experience don’t really have it, and more importantly aren’t interested in having it.

And even if you did get good boys and were planning on going coed for the first time, I think most can expect their inaugural year in coed to be a down year. After my team won Nationals twice, we moved to coed to mix things up and because we had a great boy who wanted to cheer. He was a phenomenal cheerleader but even his performance skills in a team full of 2x national champs landed us in fourth. Which I guess is fine for your first time out but not what we wanted. So after he graduated that year we went back to SL.

Plus I think a lot of coaches don’t want coed cheer teams because the boys are a distraction to the girls and vice-versa. Our one boy in our coed year wasn’t “available” to the girls so he didn’t ignite a lot of drama, but if I had a bunch a male and female cheerleaders flirting with each other during practice I’d scream. I have enough garbage about girls flirting with other girls’ boyfriends outside of practice WITHOUT the boyfriend in question being on the team.

 

[OldskoolKYcheercoach]

We’ve spent five years developing our all girl skills. “Going coed” would kill us competitively our first two years. I couldn’t do that to my girls.

We have an occasional boy that’s interested, but historically they’ve not been bigger, stronger, faster than the girls...which is what you need for true coed.

Graves was coed in the early 90’s before anyone knew who they were. It takes a long, LONG time to really develop that tradition in most places.

I will say that in my experience, if you can get your hands on some football players, wrestlers, weightlifters, etc in your school...they’re competitive drive and testosterone really buffers a lot of girl drama. If they’re focused, they bring a level of intensity to practice that only otherwise comes naturally to cheerleading if you’ve spent a lot of time developing the right culture.

 

[Kentucky Girl]

And besides, cheering on a coed high school cheerleading squad would often increase your chances of cheering on a coed college squad. Take Morehead State, for example. The coed squad has alumni from Graves County, Dyer County, Bartow and Sun Prairie while the all girl squad has alumni from Dunbar, Greenup County, Henry Clay, Houston (TN), Arlington and other top all girl high school squads. Thoughts?

 

[dat.jpp]

I think for us Pennsylvanians, all the guys here (including me) all for cheer allstar gyms instead due to the more competitive aspect of it and I know for me, I hated *cheering chanting yelling, etc* when I used to do high school cheer. Might just be me because my school stopped competing.

Out of like the 40 cheer teams here in our District 1, only around 4 of them are coed.