Cheerleading
From Wikinfo
Cheerleading is recreational activity and sometimes competitive sport involving organised routines including elements of dance and gymnastics to encourage crowds to cheer on sports teams. It is most popular in the United States. A cheerleading performer is a cheerleader.
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History
Evolving in (all-male) colleges in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries purely as attempts to encourage crowds at their sporting competitions to cheer, the practice spread and became largely a female activity as time progressed. A significant factor was limited availability of female collegiate sports. Organized cheerleading contests were formed; most high schools around the U.S.A. had formed cheerleading squads by the 1950s. Today cheerleading competitions are a ubiquitous feature of American public schools and universities as well as American professional football. State and national championships for school and college teams are common, and top squads take their routines extremely seriously.
While cheerleaders regard their sport as a serious endeavour, this is not a universal opinion. Cheerleaders are stereotyped in numerous television shows and movies in a sexist way as vacuous, sexually attractive and vain. In this view, cheerleading performances are purely showing off of the cheerleaders' bodies rather than a "real" sporting competition. Cheerleaders point to the athletic and aesthetic qualities of their routines, and the extensive physical training and rehearsal required to win competitions - or, more often, simply ignore this reputation.
Performance elements
Motions/Jumps
- Toe-touch is a jump with legs split sideways while grabing both insides of the ankles simultaneously (not toes touched in fact).
- Herkie is a jump with one leg bent and another high sideways. Hand position varies. Named after Lawrence "Herkie" Herkimer. Also misspelled as: Herky, hurky
- Quite a few moves are borrowed from dances (Breakdancing/Hip Hop) and acrobatics (e.g., Cartwheel).
Stunts
Pyramid is a cheerleading stunt that involves 5 or more persons to form a type of "pyramid" standing on each others backs.
Cheers/Chants
Every team has their "signature" cheers and chants.
External links
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Cheerleading" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheerleading, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
