The Evolution of Cheerleading
Posted on: November 23, 2019
Cheerleading has obviously developed greatly since it started in the late 18th century, but it still has kept the spirit leading tradition. It started off as just sideline cheering for whatever sport, but most likely football. Eventually, there became two different sides/purposes of cheerleading, to cheer on the sidelines and a “highly skilled competing athlete” (1).
For the uniforms, it started off with wearing a sweater and a skirt that went down to almost your ankles. Now that there are more advanced movements in routines and sideline cheers, the uniforms need to have an easier ability for moving around while either stunting, jumping or tumbling. This is why the skirts are now mid-thigh and the shirts are tight. If you are stunting and are trying to catch your flyer from dismounting her, the clothing can get in the way and result in serious injury if it is too big and there is excess material exposed. “Uniform changes are a result of the changing culture since the 1930s” (1). The uniforms we see now didn’t arrive until the 70s.
The way that cheerleading incorporated the stunting aspect of cheerleading was a way of improving team building. It was a way of building trust in your teammates and gaining the ability of working with others (2). Now, stunting is a huge part of cheerleading and it has grown greatly since the start of it all, but no one thinks of it as team building. It is just focused on perfecting it and how it will look when you perform the stunt. With stunting advancing, they had to incorporate safety guidelines.
Cheerleading has become so popular, colleges are pushing to have it recognized as a collegiate sport instead of a spirit activity. But this isn’t the only interesting part of it, the stunting aspect of the sport has been so popular that a stunting sport has been identified. With this, two teams will compete while doing the same series of stunts (2). It’s just like competitive cheerleading but only showing stunting.
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