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Cheerleading Is Not A Sport
Or is it?
This past weekend, I crammed myself, along with 80,000 other people, into the Dallas Convention Center to watch the NCA (National Cheerleaders Association) All Star Championships. It was like boarding a subway train in Japan, in which white gloved personnel, called pushers, shove people onto the train so that the doors can close.
Okay, so maybe that’s a little over exaggerated, but it was crowded.
Perceptions about cheerleading
My daughter and I traveled there, like tens of thousands of others, for her cheer competition. Although cheerleading is quite different than when I donned a uniform, it seems that public perception of “cheerleading” hasn’t.
People will often say, “What team do you cheer for? Or, some people have said, “Well, cheerleading isn’t really a sport, is it?”
The Netflix documentary called, “Cheer”, brought competitive cheerleading into public awareness, however, there’s still seems to be some confusion.
How cheer is depicted
For example, I searched both Unsplash and Pexels for photos linked to the search words, “Competitive Cheerleading”. The picture below is the type of free image that was available on Unsplash — a young woman with pom poms and flowing…
