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)?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.