While cheerleading evokes images of pompoms and pleated skirts, it has relied on increasingly athletic feats of grace and strength in recent years. As participants have perfected their basket tosses and pyramids, and mounted ambitious floor routines, a complicated and emotional question has arisen: has cheerleading become a true sport?
For many women, especially those who worked at the forefront of the push for equality in college sports, the answer for a long time was no. They feared that calling it a sport sent the wrong message to women — endorsing an embarrassing holdover from a time when girls in tight-fitting outfits were expected to do little more than yell support for boys. Those women were also skeptical of high schools and universities that counted female cheerleaders as athletes as a way to evade their obligation to provide opportunities for women in more traditional sports, like softball and soccer.
But other women bristled at what felt like an insult. Why should cheerleading not be considered a sport when it required a complex set of technical skills, physical fitness and real guts?
Now, in a development that may settle the debate, two groups are asking the National Collegiate Athletic Association to recognize a new version of cheerleading as an “emerging sport” for women, a precursor to full status as a championship sport. If successful, dozens of athletic programs could begin to fully finance cheerleading teams, recruit scholarship athletes and send them to a national championship.
The implications go beyond giving cheerleading a stamp of legitimacy. If this more athletic form of cheerleading — technically known as competitive cheer — evolves into a sport with rigorous competitions and standards, college athletics programs will be able to count the new teams for the purposes of complying with Title IX, the federal law banning gender discrimination in education.
The development could provide relief to institutions that have struggled to show they are offering enough opportunities for women, who make up 53 percent of students at Division I institutions, but just 46 percent of all athletes.
Several women’s sports advocates now support the idea. “As long as it’s actually operating as a sport, we welcome it into the women’s sports tent,” said Nancy Hogshead-Makar, the senior director of advocacy at the Women’s Sports Foundation. Like gymnastics or figure skating, she said, “this is another aesthetic sport that if done right could provide lots more girls with legitimate sports experiences.”
Yet even as the idea has been met with enthusiasm, a fight has broken out between two groups competing to have their vision approved by the N.C.A.A. Each of the proposals calls for athletic displays that incorporate elements of traditional cheerleading, like flips and pyramids, but the groups differ over how to administer and run the new sport.
One group, USA Cheer, is backed by Varsity Brands, a for-profit company that sells pompoms and uniforms and has been running competitions for high school and college cheerleaders for decades. The other group is the National Collegiate Athletics and Tumbling Association, which comprises six universities that have been competing against one another for the last couple of years and have the support of USA Gymnastics.
The effort to get cheerleading declared an emerging sport began in earnest last July after a federal judge ruled that Quinnipiac University’s competitive cheerleading team did not meet Title IX guidelines for being counted as a sport.
The judge, Stefan R. Underhill of the United States District Court in Bridgeport, found that Quinnipiac’s team did not qualify because the team and its participants were not treated the same as other varsity athletes on campus. Athletes were recruited from among the student body, there was no playoff system, and the teams sometimes competed against high school squads.
Both groups say their versions of cheerleading have addressed those concerns, and will eventually allow programs to legitimately count cheerleaders as athletes.
“It’s unique to have in essence a sport being developed out of whole cloth,” said Karen Morrison, who oversees the emerging sport process for the N.C.A.A.
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