Acroperformance Is A Sport



Well, it sounds more like a sport than NASCAR. The NY Times' Alex Williams on the evolution of Competitive Cheerleading :

Come December, judges who consider the cheerleading performance of the Georgia All-Stars at the Battle Under the Big Top competition in Atlanta may face a peculiar challenge. They will have to decide not only whether the squad has the best routine, but whether it really has anything to do with cheerleading.

"We're doing something new this year," said Jamie Parrish, the team's coach. For no particular reason but to provide visual impact, the 2 1/2-minute performance by his coed "all star" squad will be modeled around a highly conceptual hospital theme. Forget pleated skirts. The girls will wear skimpy white nurses' outfits festooned with red crosses, the boys blue surgeons' scrubs. In place of a martial fight song, the team will cue Bon Jovi's "Bad Medicine." As for pompoms, megaphones, and, yes, actual cheers, such vestiges of another age would seem almost risible in this context.

Despite the gaudiness of productions like his team's, Mr. Parrish actually considers all this more a sport than a spectacle. He is at the vanguard of a new wave of coaches who are rendering traditionbound cheerleading nearly unrecognizable to those who think it belongs first and foremost on the sidelines of "real" sports.

Indeed, at a time of year when varsity squads are breaking camp in anticipation of the first big gridiron clashes, the greater contest may be playing out within cheerleading itself — a battle for the soul of a quintessentially American institution. The momentum to turn competitive cheerleading into a major sport has grown so strong (even internationally, with talk of putting it in the Olympics) that the purists find themselves leading a new reactionary push, to reinforce the premise that cheerleading must actually involve . . . well, leading cheers.

"The days of Go! Fight! Win! are completely archaic these days," Mr. Parrish said happily.

The split is so stark, in fact, that Mr. Parrish maintains that competitive cheerleading now merits a name unto itself. " `Acroperformance' is what I'd call it," he said.

But the greater divide may be cultural. Some who insist on redefining cheerleading as a sport do not equate it with stodgy old things like field hockey. "In a way, I can say that cheerleading has become an extreme sport," said Scott Braasch, president of Cheer Tyme Inc., an all-star center in Lemoyne, Pa., whose teams like to incorporate booming sound effects like jet-fighter whooshes and whip cracks into their routines. "You just watch college nationals — you'll see four people throwing a person 30 feet in the air, girls doing X-out double folds, which are back flips with two twists. You're seeing skills you see people doing off diving boards." Rare is the gym these days that doesn't find some way to co-opt the rebel chic of either vertical skateboarding or hip-hop and work an expression like "X-treme," "Outlaw," or "Starz" into its name.

Posted: Sun - August 15, 2004 at 05:48 PM      

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