That’s the sound of a coach pep talking her team at a Niagara Falls cheer competition Globe feature writer Jana Pruden recently went deep into the world of competitive cheer it’s a sport that’s growing in Canada and it’s probably not what you think it is like the pom-poms like which oh they go
What team do you cheer for and what do you say like there’s no team I cheer for I trip myself and they’re like what does that even mean and I like show that video and they’re like oh I’ve never even seen this before I’m like yeah it’s pretty awesome Competitive cheer is not about being on the sidelines for a team these athletes are the team the sport requires the skills of a gymnast the agility of a dancer and sometimes the strength to throw your teammates 20 feet up into the air today Jana is on the show to share what
She learned about the sparkly and extremely hardcore world of competitive cheers I’m manika Ramen Wilms and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail hello Jana thank you so much for being here thanks so much for having me on uh you recently spent time in the world of
Competitive cheer and to do that you went to a three day long cheer competition in Niagara Falls in in Ontario can you just take us there like what was that atmosphere like of a cheer competition a cheer competition walking through the doors is like
Uh well I think a phrase I used at the time just with my colleagues was gloriously unhinged Amazing night are you ready to have a good time [Applause] I mean it is just Mayhem it is so loud it is so sparkly there’s so much excitement and singing and dancing [Applause] and it just is totally wild and in a really wonderful way because it is by
Its nature extremely cheerful so it is it is a real Vibe wow yeah I can I can imagine and this is a little a little gross for the top of the show but I want to bring it up anyways I heard that the competition has a vomit guys look can
You tell us what that’s about okay of all the things that have surprised me about the world of cheer the amount of vomit was like oh no very top of the list there’s a few different reasons I think one is nerves um there’s a lot of pressure and people
Are really nervous before they go on there’s a lot of kids who compete sometimes quite little kids um you could also be say you’re competing you’re already not feeling super well and then you go on and you’re going upside down and doing flips and that kind of thing and someone comes out
Later learned this was Mario the the barf guy and he cleans and disinfects the mat I remember this one moment when Mario was out there cleaning up the mats because someone had gotten sick on stage and they were blasting the song Mambo Number Five and everyone was like
Dancing and they were chanting Mario’s name and I just thought like what what world is it where am I where am I that’s amazing I I wonder like what initially what initially Drew you to this world this is not usually the kind of thing that you generally report on so what
What started this I just really was very intrigued by this Atmosphere by this subculture um by this sport that was almost entirely women and girls and uh this idea that it didn’t exist to cheer for anything anymore that it was now cheer for cheer’s sake you know also I would
Say we have a problem in the news business um that sometimes what we do is really depressing and this is like literally the happiest story I could imagine but also with some really important things going on in it too yeah yeah it’s true and and we’re going to get into some of
These things I think before we actually start to dive into the sport let’s go through some Basics because there’s a lot of terminology I think in this world that a lot of us are not familiar with so let’s just do a quick speed round of cheer terminology Janna
To start what is a base a base are the athletes that are literally serving as a base or supporting other athletes so they may be the base of a pyramid okay and yeah they’re the support and the structure so this is related I think so
What is a flyer yeah a flyer are um the athletes that are often at the top of the pyramid literally flying through the air they’re the ones getting tossed up by the bases okay and baskets baskets are when a group of athletes put their arms together to form like a basket and
They throw another athlete a flyer up in the air and catch them also in their baskets a clean what is what is a clean Yeah clean is a thing where the the cheer athlete will sort of snap their arms to their sides it’s kind of a
You know arms coming to your side in tight little fists you know it symbolizes I guess the end of a move and just kind of resets snaps in place hitting zero what does that mean well hitting zero is a big one hitting zero is it’s it’s almost in a way like the
Most important goal of a lot of cheer athletes and it means that you went through your routine with no deductions and it doesn’t always mean that you win um but it does mean that you did it you did that routine as perfectly as you could and so it’s really meaningful and
Sometimes they’re special pins and so often you’ll see a little pin that says hit zero oh okay go out there and do your best that’s nice okay well let’s let’s talk a little bit about then what what this looks like so when you’re actually watching a routine like
This uh I know you talked to one of the coaches of one of the teams uh called The Golden Girls the coach’s name is Jess Jess Montoya about what’s you talked to her about what’s required in a routine Choice how many skills you put in all of
That oh and a dance right and choreography throughout is also a mark so those are all the categories and they count how many people do them they count what they do right they count what skills they do and there’s a set of elite skills on a chart so we all know
What skills to shoot for to get that highest score right it is a lot the whole environment of a cheer competition is a lot and a cheer routine is a lot they’re two and a half minutes long the highest energy that you can possibly imagine um constant movement constant motion and
And that you can have up to 32 athletes on the stage at once wow all working in unison it’s like a machine and it can be very overwhelming and for that reason there’s multiple judges uh who are watching at the same time yeah one person can’t keep track of everybody
Though no no and and so what about what about the age range and the gender breakdown you said it’s mostly female but how does it play out yeah so in Canada right now it’s an estimated at least 98 percent female athletes can start I think as young as about five and
There is no upper age limit so in fact Jess told me you could have an athlete in their 80s if they wanted to and I guess weren’t too afraid of break making bones in this incredibly rigorous form of exercise yeah wow how big of a deal
Is Cheer in Canada Jenna like how many how many athletes are we talking about yeah it is growing really quickly and this is something that I’ve noticed just anecdotally some of my Facebook friends their daughters are doing it their nieces are doing it my cousin’s daughter
Is doing it that you just start to hear about it more and more um there was 8 000 athletes at this Nationals competition from around the country we also know Ali Moffett who was another coach that I talked to and she’s the owner of a gym called cheer sport
Sharks she has gyms opening up all the time across the country she currently has 700 kids just at her gyms alone everybody that I spoke to said it is growing and I think we’re gonna see a pretty big explosion of cheer we’ll be back in a moment
One person you talked to was uh Maddie hickey who we heard from off the top of the intro she’s a 19 year old competitor uh can you tell me a little bit about her Janna yeah so she’s a base um she’s on a team called PCT legendary
Which is a co-ed team in LA in level seven which is the highest level in cheer um she has been doing it for about nine years I met Maddie and her mom actually in line when we were going for breakfast uh on the second day of competition um the photographer and videographer and
I we were all suffering a little bit from something that’s called a cheer hangover and this is a real thing and Maddie oh what a cheer hangover yeah so on the first day of competition you know we arrived at like eight in the morning we were there till I think 10 30 at
Night we’re on our way back to the hotel and I was feeling like really really sick so in the morning we got up I was feeling better we went for breakfast and we ran into Maddie hickey and her mom she said oh have you had a chair
Hangover yet I was like I think I did I felt so sick last night and she said yeah that’s that is a real thing and it’s from the noise the energy um the whole experience so we met we met them um when we were just suffering our first
Cheer hang on trying to cure this cheer hangover yes um and uh there you know Maddie is a really interesting young woman and I think she also sums up in a lot of ways ways this kind of grit and determination that so many of the athletes I talked to show because I can’t
Buddy like High fibromyalgia so it’s like definitely painful like to continue and like I probably shouldn’t be doing such a hard on your body sport for someone who has like chronic pain but he’s so much happier I love love it like there’s nothing else I’m gonna do like I’m so excited it
Brings me like so much joy and I think there is something to be said we see this in in you know male athletes it’s almost taken for granted that oh you have this grit you get injured on the football field and you go right back out there
Um and I actually think girls like Maddie and a lot of these other athletes they’re proud of that grit they’re proud of that strength that it isn’t easy and yet they keep doing it and they keep doing it for their team and for themselves and there’s one uh young
Woman that I talk to who I think she was about 12 Alyssa and you know she told me like that has taught her that you just have to keep smiling even if you get kicked in the face by a girl you have to keep smiling and I think a lot of these young
Women and girls are really they’re really proud of that of their tenacity and their resilience yeah what about the like what kind of commitment does does cheer require from the athletes like how much how much time how much money are we talking about here building that team spirit I think requires this major
Commitment of time and also that you know you can’t do pyramids when a bunch of people didn’t come to practice right it really is about every part of the team having a really important job so um you may have say three practices a week plus you have maybe private
Tumbling lessons plus you have competitions and it’s not a cheap sport um and like anything I think there’s ways to do it more cheaply the most the most basic equipment is actually just a performance outfit and a pair of shoes um but if you are at a higher level and
The outfits get more expensive they’re about 500 each and you may only be able to use one for a year or two and then competition fees if you’re traveling a lot I definitely heard from people people you know up to eight thousand dollars a year they might be paying and
We talk about this with other sports too right how that can sometimes be a barrier for for people and certain groups of people to get into that sport uh it sounds like cheer is still kind of in its early stages in Canada but have we seen that that kind of discussion
About you know that barrier for certain people to participate so I do think there is a recognition that the costs are really high and that we will probably start to see more opportunities where people with lower incomes could be competing there is the cheer abilities program which is really wonderful and
Many of its athletes they have um you know a wide range of disabilities potentially and they’re able to compete sometimes with uh other cheerleaders who are on stage with them to help them with the moves um there’s also an interesting gender diversity happening in cheer as well we
Talked about how cheer is extremely female in Canada and most of the teams at Nationals are all girl teams but there’s some coed teams but it’s one of the few or maybe the only sport in which Elite athletes who are male and female could compete together and the expert
That I was speaking to in the states that’s a point she made that because you can have uh males and females on the same team and you don’t have to have a specific number of males and females that’s also a very inclusive space for Trans athletes so I think it has the
Potential to be a highly inclusive Sport and it will be interesting to see as the culture continues to develop in Canada I guess what that population of athletes looks like yeah yeah element of cheer is of course the aesthetic right which is the Sparkles the big hair the smiles that we talked
About right and I guess that can have some people outside of cheer maybe not looking at it as a serious sport what did what are the people that you spoke to say about that yeah that’s a really interesting part of cheer that you have this incredibly hardcore athletic Sport
And then it sort of has an aesthetic that’s sort of pageanty in a way and in some cases and people will remember this if they saw Netflix this year the Navarro poof really big um backcombed hair um sometimes very showy makeup you know spray tans things like that
Um so it definitely has a look although that look is changing in Canada If you’re trying to like do more athletic right because we were trying to get it in like the Olympics and stuff like that and we used to have like full bloom like crop tops like summer hair and I think I think like the nature of the sport and like all especially all
The stuff that’s going on right now um especially like rcsf um Canada wants like tone that down and make it look more Athletics yeah people would kind of accept it more I think which like I like eyeballing yeah yeah it looks a lot of like cleaner like yeah that’s what I always find
Funny that they don’t think it’s athletic whereas I’m like whims left wing people so that last part is hard to hear can we just can you just go over what Maddie’s mom said there yeah that’s Maddie’s mom Tanya saying whims lift weights cheerleaders lift people I mean I think
The aesthetic issue is uh an issue that everyone in cheer sort of recognizes and thinks about it’s definitely something I talked to just Montoya about I know there is definitely stereotype with that and with with people who don’t understand cheerleading it’s not all about that if you go into a
Deer practice kids are sweating sometimes crying bleeding like this is intense it’s a hardcore sport so when you walk into a practice you’ll understand and appreciate but I feel like all that hard work and and once you’ve learned how to polish and perform the skills I think Sparkles make everything look
Bigger so then here we are these coaches Sparkles make everything look bigger yeah this has been my whole thing all the way along is like what’s wrong with sparkles anyway can something not be serious because it’s sparkly and you know I think that’s an undercurrent that
Runs through a lot of cheer and a lot of this story is you know things being able to be discounted or taken less seriously because it’s girls doing it because it’s women doing it because there’s makeup in it or sparkles in it and um you know
Don’t let the Sparkles fool you this is serious it’s hardcore yeah hardcore so Cherry is getting recognition will we see it in the Olympics one day it has been green lit to potentially be in the Olympics but I think even opening the door to it is a way of acknowledging
That there is something worthy here I think whether or not it ends up ending up in the Olympics that it’s undeniable that this is a kind of competition we’re going to be seeing more and more and when you see it you cannot respect it it’s true like you see it and you think
Wow that is just unbelievable and those are true athletes that are doing that so I mean just to bring this all back to the the big competition in Niagara that that you went to Jana and to practice my my newfound sheer terminology did any of
The teams in Agra hit zero yes many of the teams hit zero there were some amazing performances was there any anything that you remember like any specific moment I guess of a performance that maybe stood out to you some of the times that stood out to me
Were the times where things went wrong I mean one of the teams that I followed through the weekend um had a real heartbreaking um performance on the final day and the way cheer is structured is that everything rests on two two and a half minute performances you’ve worked all
Year and you do these two performances the same routine performed twice and you know how small of a mistake can have such a large consequence and so I found some of those moments you know really pretty heartbreaking thinking about how much time and effort people put into
That and then also like quite inspiring when I saw how resilient the athletes were and the coaches were and you know you um feel bad for a day and then you pick yourself up and get ready to start training again yeah uh Jenna this has been a fantastic fascinating conversation thank you so
Much for being here thank you so much for having me that’s it for today I’m mainika Ramen Wilms our summer producer is negania our producers are Madeline White Cheryl Sutherland and Rachel Levy McLaughlin David Crosby edits the show Adrian Chong is our senior producer and Angela pacenza is our executive editor
Thanks so much for listening and I’ll talk to you tomorrow
It’s sparkly, athletic and enthusiastic. But it’s grittier than you might think. Competitive cheer is a fast-growing sport in Canada that requires the skills of a gymnast and the agility of a dancer. Recently, almost 8,000 athletes from around the country gathered in Niagara Falls for the national cheer championship.
The Globe’s feature writer, Jana Pruden was at the three-day competition where she spent time with athletes, parents and coaches. She’s on the show to explain what she learned and why she thinks we’ll be hearing a lot more about this sport in the coming years.
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