Cheer

When someone says "cheerleader" most people still think of those girls on the sidelines of football games with pompoms, short skirts, kicking their legs high in the air. Fair enough, that's how this whole business started. However cheerleading has grown into it's own competitive sport. If you combined the best of gymnastics tumbling, Cirque du Soleil stunting, Broadway dance, and dressed all the girls like they were in a JonBenét Ramsey beauty pageant and dressed all the boys like they were figure skaters, you have contemporary cheerleading. My daughter has been doing competitive cheerleading for seven years now. I know this world well; she has been a flyer, a tumbler, a back spot, and a front spot. I'm well aware of the stinky sneaker smell of the gym, the relentless practices, the conditioning, the tumbling, the fake eyelashes, the hairspray, the concussions, the broken toes, the broken fingers, and the sprained ankles. We have done our time at C.H.E.O. She does what is known as club or all star cheer and this year her team is going to Worlds. It's one of the highest ranking competitive cheerleading competitions in, well, the world. The equivalent level for college cheerleading is the NCA & NDA Collegiate National Championship, which happens every year in Daytona Beach, Florida. This is cheerleading at the college level. The best cheerleading college in the US is Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas. It is the focus of Netflix's documentary, Cheer. The documentary focuses on Navarro's team leading up to the big competition in Daytona. It's six part series, each about an hour and the lens stays tightly focused on about eight kids and their coach, Monica Aldama. The woman is a machine. This series brought me to tears a few times as some on the kids' stories are heartbreaking. This series is about cheerleading, but what makes it great is the focus it puts on Monica and these group of kids. Catch it on Netflix.