Is Cheerleading A Sport

Cheerleading is not considered a sport because we live in a country founded on sexism. Picture a cheerleader, what does she look like? What is she doing? More often than not, people will think of a snob nosed blondie who is doing nothing more than shaking her pom-poms, which is farther from the truth. Cheerleaders put in a lot of time, sweat, blood, injuries, and stress into perfecting the complex craft. This work is discredited every time some ignorant person says that they don’t feel that cheerleading isn’t a sport especially compared to traditionally male oriented sports. Someone needs to talk about the misogynistic undertones of bashing cheerleading as a sport, while I might not be a woman that does not mean I cannot be a rational civilized

human being.
The athletics of cheer is much more advanced and difficult to execute than when it originated in the late 18th century. Most people do not put much thought into how much work it takes to put someone 10 feet in the air while chanting at your full vocal projection. It is honestly confusing how people think that gymnastics, dance, and sailing are sports but not cheerleading. Every year all-star cheerleaders, the most advanced form of cheerleaders, are putting out new stunts and tumbling passes that surpass the previous year.
As mentioned previously, cheerleading has evolved in a small frame of time from where it began and it changes so rapidly that every year a new set of requirements is put into effect.

Cheerleading used to be only the mean popular girls, but that is no longer the case. In its creation cheerleading was only for male enjoyment – unfortunately – during the “actual” sports in short skirts. This objectification allowed for men to categorize cheerleaders as sex symbols only, but it also caused some other women to resent them. This could be either out of jealousy or because they believe that women were being degraded in the sport. A journalist from US Weekly Racheal Abrahamson, wrote an article criticizing the required look for tryouts at the University of Washington as a, “trip back to the 1950’s.” The main reason as to why cheerleaders are sometimes very revealed is because the sport requires so much flexibility and motion that even in cold weather you will be sweating. On top of that who is one woman to judge another for what she is wearing. If anyone is to blame it is sexist men who create this sexualization of the tiniest sliver of skin that is on a woman’s body, because she is then condemned as a descendant of Mary Magdalene.

Most of the resources I plan to use will be from blogs, medical journals on injury, court appeals, and coach handbooks. Since a lot of the decision to move cheer to be classified as a sport is opinion, I will use opinions of my own as well as others. Not many, if not no academic journals exist on sports let alone cheerleading, but since the injuries behind cheer are well documented I could compare them to other sports. Believe it or not cheerleading is classified as the most dangerous sport for women, even though it is not only for women, by Dr. Fred Mueller an expert on injury for the University of North

Carolina.
Cheerleading will not be considered a sport until we change how we think of women. The idea that men are held to a higher standard than women, much like the wage gap, prevents commonly feminine things to be seen as lesser. Not to sound pessimistic, but men basically run the world –sadly— but women are slowly breaking down that wall. This means that men subconsciously think women are still weak in comparison so cheerleading is not on the same level as football or another commonly male sport. Even in “actual” sports such as women’s basketball it is laughed upon, because women are not men. Women in any kind of sport is not taken seriously so when a sport is predominately all women, people are not going to take it seriously. The sad truth is that sexism is not dead, and we still believe that there is a difference between men and women that is important when it is not. I hope that my research, even though meager, could change one person’s mind. To be cliché one person’s mind can mean the universe.