With an estimated 1.5 million participants in allstar cheerleading (not including the millions more in middle school, high school, college, professional, or little league participants) in the United States alone, cheerleading is, according to Newsweek's Arian Campo-Flores, "the most quintessential of American sports." The growing presentation of the sport to a global audience has been led by the 1997 start of broadcasts of cheerleading competition by ESPN International and the worldwide release of the 2000 film Bring it On.
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With an estimated 1.5 million participants in allstar cheerleading (not including the millions more in middle school, high school, college, professional, or little league participants) in the United States alone, cheerleading is, according to Newsweek's Arian Campo-Flores, "the most quintessential of American sports." The growing presentation of the sport to a global audience has been led by the 1997 start of broadcasts of cheerleading competition by ESPN International and the worldwide release of the 2000 film Bring it On.
Due in part to this recent exposure, there are now an estimated 100,000 participants scattered around the rest of the world in countries including Australia, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
History
In 1948, Lawrence "Herkie" Herkimer, of Dallas, TX and a former cheerleader at Southern Methodist University formed the National Cheerleaders Association (NCA) as a way to hold cheerleading clinics. In 1949, The NCA held its first clinic in Huntsville, TX with 52 girls in attendance. "Herkie" contributed many "firsts" to the sport; The founding of Cheerleader & Danz Team uniform supply company, inventing the herkie, (where one leg is bent towards the ground and the other is out to the side as high as it will stretch in the toe touch position) and creating the "Spirit Stick". By the 1960s, college cheerleaders began hosting workshops across the nation, teaching fundamental cheer skills to eager high school age girls. In 1965, Fred Gastoff invented the vinyl pom-pon and it was introduced into competitions by the International Cheerleading Foundation (now the World Cheerleading Association or WCA). Organized cheerleading competitions began to pop up with the first ranking of the "Top Ten College Cheerleading Squads" and "Cheerleader All America" awards given out by the International Cheerleading Foundation in 1967. In 1978, America was introduced to competitive cheerleading by the first broadcast of Collegiate Cheerleading Championships on CBS.
In the 1960s National Football League (NFL) teams began to organize professional cheerleading teams. The Baltimore Colts (now the Indianapolis Colts) was the first NFL team to have an organized cheerleading squad. It was the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders who gained the spotlight with their revealing outfits and sophisticated dance moves, which debuted in the 1972-1973 season, but were first seen widely in Super Bowl X (1976). This caused the image of cheerleaders to permanently change, with many other NFL teams emulating them. Most of the professional teams' cheerleading squads would more accurately be described as dance teams by today's standards; as they rarely, if ever, actively encourage crowd noise or perform modern cheerleading moves.
