Sporting chance for US cheerleaders

CHEERLEADING evokes images of pompoms and young women in short, pleated skirts yelling support for all-male American football teams.

But now the US governing body is pondering whether the pursuit, in which hundreds of thousands of American females participate, should be considered a fully fledged sport.

Two groups are asking the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to recognise a version of cheerleading as an "emerging sport" for women, a precursor to gaining full status as a championship sport.

If successful, dozens of athletic programmes could begin to fully finance cheerleading teams, recruit scholarship athletes and send them to a national championship.

The implications go beyond giving cheerleading a stamp of legitimacy. If this more athletic form of cheerleading - known as competitive cheer - evolves into a sport with rigorous competitions and standards, college athletics programmes will be able to count the new teams for the purposes of complying with federal law banning gender discrimination.

The development could provide relief to colleges and universities that have struggled to show they are offering enough opportunities for women, who make up 53 per cent of students at top institutions but just 46 per cent of athletes.

Women's sports advocates back the idea. "As long as it's actually operating as a sport, we welcome it into the women's sports tent," said Nancy Hogshead-Makar, senior director of advocacy at the Women's Sports Foundation. Like gymnastics or figure skating, she said, "this is another aesthetic sport that, if done right, could provide lots more girls with legitimate sports experiences".

Yet even as the idea has been welcomed, a fight has broken out between two groups competing to have their vision approved by the NCAA. Each calls for athletic displays that incorporate elements of traditional cheerleading, like flips and pyramids, but they differ on how to run the new sport.

One group, USA Cheer, is backed by Varsity Brands, a company that sells pompoms and uniforms and has been running college and high school competitions for decades. The other group is the National Collegiate Athletics and Tumbling Association, which comprises six universities that compete against one another and have the support of USA Gymnastics.

The effort to get cheerleading declared an emerging sport began in earnest last July after a federal judge ruled that Quinnipiac University's competitive cheerleading team did not constitute a sport.

District Judge Stefan R Underhill in Bridgeport, Connecticut, found its cheerleaders were not treated the same as other athletes on campus. Cheerleaders were recruited from among the student body, there was no play-offs, and the teams sometimes competed against high school squads.Both groups say their versions of cheerleading address those concerns, and will eventually allow programmes to count cheerleaders as athletes.

Cheerleading is said to date from 1898 when a University of Minnesota medical student picked up a megaphone and led his team to victory with his chants. At first cheerleaders were men, and they still take part. In the Sixties, George W Bush was the head cheerleader at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. But in the 1920s, women joined their ranks, and cheerleading eventually became a mostly-female pastime. Participants also began adding jumps and other acrobatic stunts to their routines, as well as wearing skimpy uniforms.

But even as cheerleading edged closer to resembling a sport, advocates for gender equity in sports resisted calling cheerleaders athletes.

"Historically, cheerleading has been about supporting athletes, not about being an athlete," said Barbara Osborne, who advises universities on gender equity.

However, some colleges tried to count cheerleading as a sport only to avoid penalties for failing to deliver sports to females.

"Traditional sideline cheerleading was always one of the places that schools wanted to go, not because they suddenly felt that it was a great way of boosting equity, but because it was a great way of boosting their rosters," said Lisa Maatz, director of public policy for the American Association of University Women.

But for women who pursued competitive cheerleading, the lack of recognition felt like disrespect. "Guess what?" said Valerie Hagedorn, head cheerleading coach at Adams State College in Colorado, a team that competed in USA Cheer this year. "We don't throw footballs, we throw people. And we catch them."

The two proposals being considered by the NCAA are similar: the competitions are longer and more standardised than in the past, athletes now wear uniforms more akin to volleyball players, and no longer rally crowds.

However, they differ in how to score events and how many competitions to stage in any season. Osborne is wary of allowing universities to count cheerleaders as athletes. "What we consider sports are things that men have traditionally played," she said. But she added: "It's perfectly OK for girls to compete in something that is uniquely feminine. I think that we can't just say that sports exist in ways that men define it."