Cheerleading Culture Essay

The cheerleading culture is one that has many different point of views from many different people. The most popular, prettiest, peppiest girl in school is the popular cheerleader in most minds, which is implanted in ones brain from TV shows and movies. In reality, cheerleading originated with the male gender. It all started off with the boys of the Freshman class at Texas A&M, this is where they decided to dress up in school sweaters and bring mega-phones to games and basically just cheer on the football team since they were not allowed to bring dates at the time. “They became so popular, especially with women, that soon the juniors and seniors took the role away from the freshmen. Only men took on the highly visible role of cheerleading until …show more content…
Waving them around and shouting different cheers, their importance is too get the crowd excited about what is going on during the game. Pompoms are made with plastic, wool, cotton, paper, etc. and are made with a variety of colors. Having flashy, bright colors waved around throughout the entire game shows that cheerleaders are always trying to keep the audience excited and are always ready to cheer. Pompoms are also used as props throughout routines. They are tossed around in all different directions when stunts are being used in these routines and are actually used for a few moves, then thrown to the side. Pompoms have little importance for a team who do intense moves such as flips, lifts, and pyramids. The importance of pompoms becomes less and less when you get to competition cheer, due to all the different moves they are doing. They are just used to add to the sparkly, and over the top uniforms that are worn by a …show more content…
The formation made is a regular triangular pyramid, in which every team member kneels on top of one another. The most amount of people are on the bottom and it decreases by one each time, depending on how many people are on the team. When the pyramid is finally completed, there is one person kneeling on top. This person seems to be the most dominant, being that she is the only one kneeling alone. She seems to have the most control, however, she actually has the least control of how this pyramid stands. If one person at the bottom loses balance, then the entire formation is ruined. All the responsibilities are on the bottom half of the pyramid. This means that to be on top you must have a group that supports you no matter what. A pyramid is hard to form, especially for the few members who are stuck at the bottom. In order for that one person to stand on top and look their best the rest of the team but work together to keep her up without collapsing. The pyramid is something that seems to have no cheering purpose, but instead signifies “the sense of harmony and unity within ourselves and with the environment to which we aspire.”(timeforchange.org). This means that not only are they cheerleaders doing this formation for show, but they are doing it to represent how well they work together as a team. The pyramid formed by cheerleaders has much more