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| A Columbia University Cheer Squad circa 1920 |
It’s
Saturday so college football will be breaking out across the country. Basketball
and hockey tonight, the NFL wall to wall tomorrow. A sports fan’s wet dream come true. That wet dream is in no small way enhanced by
the presence at virtually all of these contests of attractive cheerleaders in tight sweaters and
short skirts with smiles on their lovely faces and enthusiasm in their
voices.
You
might ask, to whom do we owe this froth on the beer stein of athletic
bliss? It you don’t ask, I am about to
tell you anyway.
Team
sports emerged slowly from the elite colleges
and universities on the East Coast in the 19th Century. What began as
rough pick-up games of primitive football
on the Quad with few rules, or
even set numbers of players, slowly evolved into more organized contests
between fraternities or clubs.
Eventually schools began to challenge each other. The first interscholastic games usually
credited to Harvard and McGill from Montreal, which played rugby
style games with an oblong ball in 1874 and ’75.
That
general style of play spread to other schools—Yale, Princeton, and Columbia which had originally played a soccer like game in which carrying the
ball had been prohibited. By 1876 the
schools agreed on new, mutually acceptable rules and the Ivy League was off and running.
The game was soon refined by Yale’s
Walter Camp. Newspapers began to
carry stories of the heroics on the field.
Competition spread. By 1880 eight
universities, including the University
of Michigan in the wilds west of the Allegany’s
were competing. Ten years later the
number had swollen to 43.
About
that time Princeton lads who could
not make the team, decided to get in on the fun by organizing the first pep squad—a club in matching beanies and jackets who sat together in the stands and chanted special cheers
for their team. Other members of the
crowds learned to join in. Players
reported that they were energized by the show of loyalty and support and played
even harder for the glory of the school.
Like
other innovations, pep squads spread quickly to other schools and soon college
games were almost as much a contest between yelling fans as players on the
field. But still, alas, no real
cheerleaders.
That
is until November 2, 1898. Out on the
northern hinterlands the University of Minnesota
had taken up football and four years earlier a Princeton grad had
introduced the Pep Squad to the school.
Naturally, they had their own special cheer which went something like “Rah,
Rah, Rah! Ski-U-Mah! Hoo-Rah! Hoo-Rah! Varsity! Varsity! Minn-e-so-ta!” Catchy, eh?
In the fall of ’98 the team had fallen on hard times and lost four games
in a row. They were discouraged. The fans were glum.
On
this particular afternoon they were set to play snooty Northwestern University, a power house which liked to cast itself
as the equal of the old eastern Ivies.
The Pep Squad got together and decided to try something desperate. Instead of just sitting together and chanting
the cheers in the hopes the crowd would pick it up, they appointed Yell Leaders who stood up, turned
around and urged the fans to join the cheers.
Most of them stayed in the stands.
But during a lull in the action one of the Yell Leaders, Johnny Campbell actually ran onto the
field and led the cheer through a megaphone.
The crowd went wild, and the inspired team rose up and whipped
Northwestern.
Thus
the early modern cheerleader was born.
Soon other members of the pep squad came down from the stands to work
along the sidelines with their megaphones.
The custom spread like wild fire.
So
much so that by the 1920’s and early ‘30’s cheerleaders were a regular feature
in the college comedies that were popular in silent films and early talkies.
Meanwhile
cheerleaders were jazzing up their acts a little—adding fight songs, a greater
variety of cheers, arm movements, and a bit of acrobatics to the sidelines.
In
1923, it was again the University of Minnesota, which shocked the sporting
world by allowing co-eds to cheer
alongside he men. The innovation seemed
like an attack on a manly preserve. It
was slow to catch on. It wasn’t until
the Draft in 1940 followed shortly
by World War II started draining
campuses of men that the ranks of women cheerleader really took off. By war’s end they were the majority.
When
Johnny came marching home, he did not, by in large, use the GI Bill a become cheerleader. In what could be a case study about how feminization of any activity tends
toward ghettoization, by the early ‘50’s outside of the few remaining bastions
of all male schools, cheerleading was dominated by women.
Even
in those male bastions, cheerleading lost its luster a bit and its
practitioners sometimes derided for their girly pursuit. When George Bush attended Yale he was a baseball star. When son George
W. went there in the ‘60’s he was a cheerleader and was mocked for it.
That
trend continued until 90% of collegiate cheerleaders are women, according to
something called the International Cheer
Union (ICU). Of late, however, a few
previously all-female teams have added a few men for muscle for the
increasingly complex and daring acrobatics
that have become the center of modern cheering.
The
new elements that revolutionized cheerleading can be traced to one man--Lawrence “Herkie” Herkimer, a
cheerleading coach at Southern Methodist
University. In 1948 he founded the
first cheerleading clinic at Sam Houston State Teacher’s College. Texas rapidly became the epicenter of
cheering culture. According to the
breathless description on the ICU web page:
Herkie went on
to develop his signature “Herkie” jump, the spirit stick, the “pom pon” (also
called “shakeroos” in that time), all important elements in cheerleading to
this day. Separate cheerleading pom pon
teams (also termed “Cheerdance”) are also trained by Herkimer and begin to
develop on sport sidelines around the United States as an added entertainment
and game leadership component of cheerleading.
The
change in Cheerleading was reflected in popular culture. Romance between cute cheerleaders and hunky
athletes became a staple of TV and
movies in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. But when
teen angst comedies caught on in the eighties, cheerleaders took on a darker,
more menacing aspect. They were seen as
the cold and haughty unapproachable objects of outcast nerds’ fantasies or
often as the vicious leaders of high school cliques tormenting sensitive girls.
By
the ‘70’s things were changing again. On
the pro level the sensationally popular Dallas
Cowboy Cheerleaders made cheering sexy.
Girls on squads down to Jr. High were soon liberated from bulky
sweaters, pleated skirts, and knee socks.
If not quite as much cleavage or thigh got flashed on high school sidelines,
it was a matter of degree.
The
Cowboy Cheerleaders also introduced much more dance and complicated choreography. Pretty soon the second stringers of the Pom
Pon squads were doing most of the pep work leading the star cheerleaders to
concentrate on sideline performance and half-time spectaculars.
In
the mid-70’s entrepreneur Jeff Webb
founded the a new cheerleading camp that introduced the “cheerleading routine”—a
mini-show incorporating dance and acrobatics.
That led to cheerleading as an athletic completion in its own
right. He founded that ubiquitous ICU
and began franchising his camps and systems worldwide. He made a deal with the infant and content
starved new cable network ESPN to
feature his National Cheerleading
Championships which were also syndicated for over-the-air broadcast.
Now
in addition to high school and college teams there are competitive All Star teams not associated with any
other athletic teams to cheer for.
These
competitions, high school, college, and All Star have become the focus of a new
genre of cheerleading movies—usually a variation on the tried and true Bad News
Bears formula in which scrappy misfits and underdogs come together to
unseat a nasty and arrogant team for a championship and glory.
No
wonder little girls still dress up as cheerleaders on Halloween—and almost no boys do.
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