Is Cheerleading a Sport?

Johnathon Pablo, Staff Writer
May 21, 2012
Filed under Opinion

According to state standards, cheerleading is an official school sport. Cheer awards physical education credits and if taken all four years, participants will not have to take a PE class in high school.

Really? Cheerleading is an official school sport? Any activity that involves putting make up on before hand should not be considered a sport. Cheerleaders are considered to be good or not by one factor: how good they can flirt with the audience before it reaches the level of not being school appropriate.

Basketball players wear tank tops and basketball shorts to give them freedom and flexibility to fight for a win in a tough game. Football players wear pads and helmets to protect them when they tackle the opposing team. Cheerleaders wear skirts and a long sleeve shirt to go out and show off their flexibility and dance to bits and pieces of the top 10 songs of the current time. The skirts aren’t even necessary, you can always expect a segment in the song that the cheer girls will drop down and shake their booties too, exposing their spankies anyway.

There’s nothing wrong with cheerleaders, that’s why America loves sports. The arrangement alone should win the inventor some sort of reward. An intense basketball game comes to a halt. A bunch of beautiful women come out and entertain the crowd. It’s a genius idea, but in no way is it a sport. Renee R., a writer for TeenInk magazine, says, “A sideline cheerleaders’ main goal is to entertain the crowd and lead them with team cheers, which should not be considered a sport. On the other hand, competitive cheerleading is a sport.” High schools award sports credits for sideline cheerleading.

Competitive cheerleading is a group of people who cheer in front of a set of judges, competing among other teams to win a prize of some sort. Sideline cheerleaders’ attend sports games and entertain the crowd and attempt to lead them with team chants/cheers. Sideline cheerleading being considered a sport is like saying being a school mascot is a sport. Mascots solely serve the purpose of interacting with the crowd and entertaining them when the game is at a standstill. Both positions have no opponents, no scores, and no victory nor defeat.

In school cheering there is no competition. The sole reason the students even run during practice is so the law can be generous enough to even consider cheering to be a sport, just because it follows the book definition of one. That’s almost as ridiculous as congress recently passing a law claiming pizza to be a vegetable due to its high concentration of tomato paste, so it could be served in schools. Just because the state claims something to be true, it doesn’t make it so. Teams are not judged based on their performance, nor are they physically awarded for doing so.

Sideline cheerleading is not a sport. It never has and never will be.

Sources:
http://teenink.com/nonfiction/sports/article/15172/Cheerleading-is-a-Sport/ – Renee R.