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Yesterday morning I heard about a trial just starting in neighboring Connecticut. The issue under contention: cheerleading. Specifically, should cheerleading, of the competitive, dancing/tumbling/throwing people in the air variety (video w/ annoying music) that you’ve probably seen on ESPN, count as a varsity sport?
For a primer, I suggest you listen to this segment of the Brian Lehrer show (about 14 minutes long), where BL interviews Neena Chaudhry, a lawyer for the National Women’s Law Center who has been handling Title IX cases for years. You might also read this story.
The long and short of it: Quinnipiac University wants to deem cheerleading a varsity sport, thus making the number of women who participate in it “count” towards their Title IX numbers, and ditch their women’s volleyball team, which it already tried to do last year.
Many of the comments I’ve seen in response to this story are really problematic, often taking shots at the athleticism of cheerleaders or volleyball players; that is, attacking women for being wussy and pitting them against each other, rather than discussing what this means on a larger scale, or keeping the focus on the Athletics Department at Quinnipiac, which seems to have juked the numbers of male and female athletes to stay “compliant” with Title IX in the past, and may be primarily interested in the fact that cheerleading is a much less expensive program to run.
I know our readers can do better. There are a lot of questions here, including:
- Should cheerleading qualify as a “sport” by objective standards?
- Are women better served by having Title IX money go to support more female athletes, regardless of their game, or by having it routed towards (or away from) certain fields of endeavor?
- Is cheerleading problematic as a sport, given its roots in YAY BOYZ auxiliary cutesy-tootsyness and its continued dedication to a certain kind of female display?
- Cheerleading is really dangerous. Should girls and women be coached away from it?
- Or should they be coached toward it, since it’s another place where many can learn about discipline and healthy competition and come to appreciate their bodies as remarkable things?
- And does making cheerleading a co-ed sport make the answers to these questions any different?
Have any of our readers participated in cheerleading? I’d be particularly interested to hear from them. I was on my high school’s dance team (yeah yeah yeah), and we did not qualify as a sport, even though we had a “season,” and went to competitions and stuff in addition to performing at home games. Cheerleading–of the “GOOOOOOOOOOOO TIGERS!!!” variety–was a varsity sport at my school, however. That doesn’t seem fair either.
*scratches head* Readers? BRING IT ON.
P.S. It just so happens that TODAY is the 38th anniversary of Title IX’s signing into law. How’d I miss that?
At my alma mater, cheerleading was a co-ed varsity sport—there were dude cheerleaders and they were just as buff and athletic as the girls and did all the same yelling on the sidelines at football games. So there were fewer problematic gender issues for me with college cheering than with high school cheerleading (which was all girls and stereotypically femme/cutesy/pom-pom shaking).
I think it seems like Quinnipiac is trying to find a way to get the most varsity female athletes on the books so they can be Title IX compliant. My guess is they’re doing this is so that they can maintain funding for their all-male teams without having to shell out the same level of money for women’s teams. Hence, choosing cheering over volleyball. That’s a problem. It may adhere to the letter of equality law, but it certainly violates the spirit of it.
FWIW, I don’t think the whole “cheering is dangerous” argument holds much water. Women’s gymnastics is similarly dangerous. Football is very dangerous over the long run, but IMO there’s not nearly enough concern for football players because of tough-guy stereotypes. I simply think parents tend to hand-wring more over girls being injured than boys.
This is a really difficult and interesting issue, Dork.
I personally term all judged competitions, “athletic competitions” as opposed to “sports” (where results are based on pure time or points) but that’s my own little quirk and I know it’s a very touchy subject.
I do think that Cheerleading should count as a varsity sport or perhaps varsity activity would be better? I mean I know most high schools give varsity letters for all sorts of non-athletic activities including Band or Debate Club etc… HOWEVER, it is troubling to hear that the school seems to be doing this to skirt Title IX requirements.
I do believe that the legislative intent of Title IX was to encourage girls to engage in more classic ideas of “sport” but then again, who can argue with personal choice?
Lastly, ooof don’t kill me but I personally do find cheerleading somewhat problematic in it’s YAY BOYZ focus even though I know, I KNOW, that cheerleading has become more about competitions etc and less about game time cheering. Again I think it’s about choice but also it’s about a society that teaches girls that cheerleaders are the “hot” ones and girls who run track or play basketball are the “sporty” ones. Sporty of course being infinitely less desirable then hot.
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Becky, I totally agree w/r/t the “dangerous activity” argument. You could say that about most sports. Really I think the issue should focus more on high school students being put in increasingly dangerous situations by coaches etc and the focus on winning at all costs.
I tend to think that if cheerleading is going to count as a sport, then game-time cheering should be abolished. I do think that cheering is athletic enough to count as a sport but no other sport is used as a way to entertain people during the boring parts of the games of other sports. Although maybe we should be going the other direction? Like they could have people doing martial arts or something on the sidelines of soccer games during the 85 minutes when no scoring is happening.
I’ll be the first to say that cheerleading, in its modern form, is as demanding physically as volleyball or most any other “sport.” But does mere physical exertion transform any activity into a sport for purposes of Title IX? I’d say no.
I think, in order for something to be considered a “sport”, there should be an objective criteria for scoring against an opponent, which cheerleading doesn’t have.
Title IX, if I understand correctly, is a zero-sum game and choices like this have to be made. I’m on team Volleyball.
One more thing. People here seem to be downplaying the dangerousness of cheerleading. According to the linked article “[c]heerleading accounted for 65.2 percent of high school and 70.5 percent of college catastrophic injuries among all female sports.”
If I were a college administrator this might factor into my decision-making to go with volleyball over cheerleading.
Baraqiel has an excellent point. We should treat it as a sport or club or whatever and stop calling it “cheerleading”, since that’s not what happens at competitions anyhow. And yes, booty shaking girls are not necessary to the viewing of any sport. That’s one big point in baseball’s favor.
It’s so clear that this school is trying to game (as it were) Title IX. Allocate the money equally between boys’ and girls’ programs and this won’t be a problem.
Our newspaper had an article the other day about how much college football costs colleges. The myth is that it runs a profit, which is then used to support academic programs. But in reality,academics ends up paying for football. It’s outrageous.
So title IX money must be for sports, explicitly? How is compliance measured? I take it it’s not the amount of money spent but rather the number of male and female participants.
What about dance? Dance at its highest levels is very rigorous, and maybe has more female than male participants. But people and money spent on dance don’t seem to count, I take it.
@charlemagne: I don’t think we’re downplaying the dangerousness of it. All high-impact or contact sports are risky. I think the reason that cheerleading accounts for such a high percentage of injuries is that it’s one of the few sports for girls that is a contact, high-impact sport. Nearly all girls’ sports are non-contact: tennis, basketball, soccer, rowing, track, volleyball, softball, swimming, etc.
I don’t think college administrators decide whether to keep or cut a sport based on relative risk of injury, though. If they did, they’d have cut football a long time ago.
MM: I’d be interested in reading that article. Was it in the P-G?
rod: Yes, parts of T9 are explicitly about funding athletic endeavors. Here’s a good, if now slightly old, PDF on its history.
If you listen to the BL interview, Chaudhry mentions that there are certain specific qualities a sport/activity must meet in order to qualify as Title IX-appropriate–and cheerleading does not yet meet some of them.
There is a problem, I think, with having rah-rah cheerleading and competitive cheerleading generally called the same thing. I’m not sure it would be possible to rename the latter (although leading cheers seems to be a comparatively small part of it), since there is an entrenched culture. And I wonder what a new name would mean for the sport–would it be so appealing to girls and women without the sociocultural cache that cheerleaders have?
I could follow Baraquiel’s lead and take a cheap shot at cheerleading (don’t think your soccer comment has gone unnoticed – in defence of my national sport, rather 85 minutes of skill – i accept that England actually lack this but other countries do not – then the pointless score racking up that is basketball) but actually i think that
1. It is very athletic and should be counted as a sport
2. It should be removed from the sidelines and the whole hey boyz thing and treated as a sport in it’s own right similar to gymnastics. Because for one thing (and yes here’s the cheap shot) grown up sports played and watched by grown ups don’t actually need half naked women to entertain them in the few minutes that the athletes aren’t on the pitch.
3. Quinipiac are clearly fudging their rules – which bothers me as I think Title IX is one of the best things about America, it’s absence in the UK being just one of the reasons why British girls abandon sport early.
ps I’m only joking re the soccer stuff but it was a bit of a cheap shot.
@Emilyanne, I thought the same thing re soccer. I think the argument could also be made that soccer *is* a contact sport as well (and one plagued by its special set of injuries), but now I am getting really off-track.
As someone who played soccer and volleyball and swam competitively through high school, I think this is a really interesting and complicated question. Asked in any other context whether I thought college cheerleading was a sport, I would say YES. Without a doubt. But, in this context, where the aim is to skirt Title IX, which was initiated for the very point of giving female athletes an opportunity to do something BESIDES cheerleading, it stinks. And perhaps that’s the fault of Title IX authors. I can only see this becoming a slippery slope where other activities (dance, as previously mentioned) could be redefined to give schools more outs. And trickling down to high school sports as well, which is the most worrying part.
Our high school canned its water polo team rather than face the challenge of starting a womens team, yet poored thousands into a football program that had over 70 team members. 70!!! How many other high school sports teams get so many “special teams” and substitutes.
Football is not to blame in Quinnipiac’s case though, as they don’t appear to have a team. A cursory glance at their website shows, in fact, far more women’s teams than mens (competitive cheer is listed there as well, no doubt in advance of this hearing).
So, to play devil’s advocate, maybe this is just an issue of a small school trying to balance their budget and makes their athletics department work. I’m really torn.
@emilyanne – What would international relations be without cheap shots at other people’s national pastimes?
@LadyBrain: Good point about Quinnipiac’s not having a football team and having lots of women’s teams. But I’m torn in exactly the same way you are.
And I totally agree with the commenters about the “Hey boyz!” aspect of cheerleading. When cheering is co-ed or focused more on just the movements and acrobatics, I’m cool with it. But the booty-shaking femme stuff definitely rubs me the wrong way.
I agree with others who have said that it should not count if any sideline cheering is involved. I do wonder how many participants would quit the cheerleading team if they weren’t actually leading cheers at football or basketball games. Or, maybe they can lead cheers at men’s games if the team is co-ed and also cheers at women’s games? Same number of each, obviously.
Here are some more things to consider – does the school offer scholarships to cheerleaders? Are team members selected in any respect based on their looks, or is it strictly by athletic ability (and perhaps attitude)?
Dork, here’s the link: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10169/1066476-449.stm
@Barquiel – nothing it’s true. Although to be honest after watching England we deserve all the cheap shots everyone can throw at us.
[...] June 24, 2010 · Leave a Comment We’ve discussed the legitimacy of turning cheerleading into a varsity sport, and now comes a Connecticut lawsuit where Quinnipiac University has tried to turn cheerleading — an admittedly dangerous and draining activity — into a varsity sport to raise the number of female athletes at the school. [...]