Growing ‘Sport’ : And Now the Cheerleader Is Cheered

At high schools around the country, cheerleading is noisily undergoing profound changes.

“It’s not a wriggle, a shake and a yell anymore,” said Lawrence R. Herkimer, president of the National Cheerleading Assn.

High-kicking pompon lines have been replaced by routines that look like a Michael Jackson video. And acting spunky and being popular aren’t enough for today’s cheerleaders. They have to be gymnasts and dancers.

But more than style is changing. The basic reason for a cheerleader’s existence--rooting for the home team--is being shaken to the core. Last month, the Simi Valley High cheerleaders chose to miss a boys state playoff basketball game to compete in a national cheerleading tournament. In their hearts, the basketball team wasn’t No. 1; the cheerleading team was.

Same Rights

A lot of Simi Valley parents fumed at what they viewed as a breach of faith. But the cheerleaders were supported by their principal, Dave Ellis, who said they have the same right to fulfill their potential as any other students.

And cheerleaders from other schools understood. “Cheerleaders are a sports team now, just like the other teams at school,” said Danielle Gorman, a junior cheerleader at Canoga Park High. “We can root for ourselves.”

Competition is responsible for the cheerleaders’ declaration of independence. It has made cheerleaders participants rather than ornaments on the sideline. In state and national tournaments, it has given cheerleaders a taste of personal, not reflected, glory, elevating them to new status on campus.

“In the past we were made out to be dizzy blondes, but now we’re respected by all the athletes at school,” Gorman said. “They know that what we do takes as much stamina, willpower and practice as anything they do.”

Rapid Growth

Competitive cheerleading has been around since the late 1940s, but in the last five years it has grown more than tenfold.

As participation skyrockets, the stakes also go up. Cheerleaders are in the unaccustomed role of players under pressure.

“It’s serious business,” said Ron Forsberg, coach of a top-ranked team. “I see a lot of stressed-out kids.”

A big reason for the surging popularity of competitive cheerleading is what tournament judge Jamie Fox calls “flash.” While cheerleading at games retains most of its old routines, tournament teams put on explosive, high-energy shows. That attracts athletically talented girls and an increasing number of boys--some of whom are even quitting the football team to be cheerleaders.

“There’s nothing sissified about becoming a cheerleader these days,” Herkimer said.

Some schools hire professional choreographers before important competitions. Talent consultants are paid to help coaches pick the team. Summer camp is practically mandatory. Practices are long, hard and year-round. Injuries are up. So are emotions.

At Six Flags Magic Mountain recently, large numbers of Saturday afternoon fun seekers were in line at a roller coaster, oblivious to the ninth annual California State Cheerleading Championships taking place on the other side of the Valencia amusement park.

Up the hill, around a bend, just past the Snackin’ Shack, hundreds of screaming cheerleaders had convened under one roof. A wall of noise was thundering out of the cavernous Showcase Theater. Inside, 18 teams of varsity cheerleaders were warming up their vocal cords simultaneously. The teams, ranging from eight to 18 members, sat on benches in the covered concrete amphitheater. They were finalists in a competition that had begun the preceding weekend.

This year’s tournament drew 92 varsity and 64 junior varsity teams from throughout the state.

3-Minute Routine

Each team did a three-minute routine divided into a cheer and a dance number. Five judges, all former cheerleaders and instructors, rated performance on everything from facial expression and showmanship to choreography and technique.

Performing before judges has created another basic change in the cheerleaders’ lives: They have to worry about their own mistakes being costly, not the quarterback’s.

“Like Debi Thomas, all you need is one or two falls to ruin everything,” said the tournament’s creator and producer, David Mirisch.

Mirisch, 52, promotes things like celebrity bowling and charity basketball for his David Mirisch Enterprises of Beverly Hills. Cheerleading is his pet project. He was a cheerleader at Ripon College in the late ‘50s. About 10 years ago he originated the Los Angeles Rams cheerleaders. In 1979 he decided to hold the first California high school championship. Mater Dei of Santa Ana beat 49 teams to win it. Since then the entries have nearly doubled.

At the largest U.S. tournament, the National Cheerleading Assn. Championships in Orlando, Fla., 350 teams competed in this year’s finals, 10 times the number of 1983. The NCA regionals drew 10,000 teams contrasted with fewer than 1,000 five years ago.

Summer Camps

Mirisch’s tournament is affiliated with the Dallas-based NCA, which was founded in 1948 and is the oldest organization of its kind in the country. Each summer the NCA runs 350 camps for more than 150,000 high school and junior high cheerleaders who pay $250 for the four-week sessions. Another national organization, Universal Cheerleading Assn. of Memphis, attracts 60,000 cheerleaders to 350 camps.

As tournaments expand, so does the desire to win. The state crown, Mirisch said, “is as big as winning the CIF for a basketball team. The competition each year is getting more intense. Teams are starting to sign up as early as September.” Next year, for the first time, Mirisch will split the field into small and large teams.

Mirisch said his tournament is “recognized as the state championship,” but it’s still not official because it lacks the seal of approval from the California Interscholastic Federation, the state’s governing body for high school sports. The CIF has not adopted competitive cheerleading as a sport.

“I’m not making any value judgments,” said CIF Commissioner Thomas E. Byrnes. “There are 432 sports in the Encyclopedia of Sports. The CIF has adopted only 23. It’s where the interest is. At one time volleyball wasn’t an adopted sport in California. A number of schools have surfing and rodeo, which aren’t adopted sports.”

Coach Has No Doubts

Is cheerleading really a sport? Canoga Park High School’s coach, Carolyn Purkey, doesn’t think there is any doubt.

“Cheerleading is gymnastics and tumbling,” she said. “It has all the elements of sports, like discipline and athletic ability. Anybody who doesn’t recognize it as a sport isn’t in tune with what’s going on. They must be thinking back to the ‘50s.”

Some male athletes agree that cheerleading is fully respectable. “I get more out of it,” said Garth Irons, who quit football to lead cheers at Hanford High School in Central California. “It’s cool for a guy to be a cheerleader.”

About a third of the nation’s 35,000 high schools have competitive teams, according to Herkimer. In California, it’s estimated that the figure is fewer than 10% of the 1,200 high schools. Byrnes said there would have to be a “grass-roots” campaign to get competitive cheerleading adopted as a CIF sport, but there is not yet a statewide organization or even an attempt to start one.

Recognition Means Money

It would make a major difference to people like Canoga Park’s Purkey if cheerleading became a recognized sport. Those sports get school money for coaches, uniforms and travel. Cheerleaders now have to pay their own expenses. Purkey, a physical education teacher, gets no extra pay for working hundreds of hours with the team.

To compete in out-of-town tournaments, teams have to raise thousands of dollars (one team sold $18,000 worth of candy and coffee mugs). Canoga Park’s trip to Dallas for a tournament cost $7,500. After the team qualified at the Irvine regional, Purkey had three weeks to raise the money. The school’s administration, faculty and booster club chipped in, and the cheerleaders asked relatives for donations. Other teams at the school held fund-raisers. Even with that, parents had to come up with the bulk of the money.

Rousing Cheer

The Canoga Park cheerleaders finished sixth at Dallas in the co-ed division and were first at Magic Mountain after the preliminaries. When it was their turn on the Showcase Theater stage, the 18-member team--14 girls and four boys--raced through a rousing cheer. Then, accompanied by Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” roaring from a high-powered sound system, they performed a number choreographed by Purkey that would have raised heartbeats on “Dance Fever.” A crowd of 3,000, including competitors, roared approval.

But after the performance, the Canoga Park cheerleaders weren’t jumping for joy. Most were downcast. They were consoling one another with hugs. One girl stood off to the side in tears. Purkey called them together and said she was disappointed in their performance. Apparently there had been enough slip-ups to wipe out any championship hopes and drop them to fourth.

‘How Could You?’

“You worked so hard,” she told them. “How could you mess it up now?”

The answer was pressure, cheerleader Gorman said. “We always seem to tense up in the finals,” she said. To get ready for the big tournaments, the team had practiced four or five hours a day after school for three months. On weekends they put in another six or seven hours. By the time the state tournament arrived, “everybody was really up-tight,” Gorman said.

While the Canoga cheerleaders moped outside the amphitheater, fellow students emerged from the stands to cheer them up. Cheerleading, still predominantly a female activity, has always been attacked by feminists for perpetuating the sexist stereotype that men do the work and women serve as support groups. But at the state tournament, Canoga’s varsity athletes went to watch and cheer the cheerleaders.

“They give us support, so we’re here to support them,” said Joe Rudolph, a wrestler.

“I like watching these guys,” wrestler Todd Kaufman said. “They’re in one of the hardest sports. Cheerleading is really exciting. It’s like wrestling in the sense of movement, timing and execution.”

Rash of Injuries

And like athletes in other sports, cheerleaders are at risk during competition. Aerial maneuvers and pyramids have become more daring, causing a rash of injuries. Organizations like the NCA are imposing restrictions on some dangerous maneuvers. Even so, cheerleaders, under the watchful eyes of three spotters, were being tossed and flipped 15 to 20 feet in the air on stage. On every team two or three youngsters had knees taped or encased in elastic sleeves.

Perilous tricks aren’t the only cause of serious injuries. “Overuse also contributes,” said Don Forsberg, a volunteer coach of the Arroyo High cheerleading squad in San Lorenzo.

Teams usually don’t have alternates and can’t teach a substitute fast enough to fill a gap.

“So an injured player can’t quit,” Forsberg said, “or she’ll let the other kids down. They feel obligated to play with injuries.”

Kids Are Tired

As the contest at Magic Mountain neared an end, Forsberg looked around at cheerleaders trying to come down from the adrenaline rush of competition. They looked drained. “I see a lot of kids who are really tired,” said Forsberg, whose own team drove 15 hours round-trip on consecutive weekends and placed fifth. “They seem relieved it’s over.”

All that remained was for the winner to be announced. Mirisch took the stage and read the names of 12 teams that had earned honorable mention. The six remaining teams were asked to go on stage. Huddling together, arms linked, the finalists bounced up and down and waited for Mirisch to announce the order of finish, starting with sixth place. When a team heard its name, its members left the stage, forcing smiles.

The winner was Hanford High, a school of 2,000 students 35 miles south of Fresno. The Hanford team had skipped a varsity basketball playoff game to compete at Magic Mountain. Boys make up half of the 16-member team, and all the boys had quit varsity sports in the fall to become cheerleaders.