Throughout my entire athletic career, ranging from tennis since I could walk, to ballet and different variations of dance from the age of 6, up until 13 when I first started All-Star Cheerleading, those around me have always been obsessed with measurements.
Winners are determined by scores. Rankings are generated by statistics. The purpose of times, distances, percentages, and placements is to make performance measurable. Because numbers seem impartial, athletes spend years chasing them. They offer a system for understanding achievement.
Yet, some measurements are stranger than others.
The more time I spend continuing cheerleading, the more I’ve realized that individuals are perpetually measuring sports too. However, those dimensions aren’t calculated through effort, commitment, difficulty or athleticism, but instead by perceptibility. The sports that are immediately granted legitimacy are the ones appearing on television, Olympic ceremonies, and in daily conversations, while those existing outside that spotlight are often set aside and forced to justify their existence.
Despite demanding profuse amounts of strength, it also requires flexibility, endurance, coordination, and most of all, trust, while remaining one of the most misunderstood athletic disciplines globally. When I mention All-Star cheerleading, people immediately imagine pom-poms, sidelines, and football games. The assumption arrives before the explanation. And what’s funny is that I have competed at the Cheerleading Worlds twice as an international team, and I still get asked who I cheer for.
The irony becomes difficult to ignore.
Cheer is built on measurement. Every skill has an integer, every routine has a score, and every deduction tallies. However, those who are not involved in the sport frequently use an entirely distinct ruler.
Popularity is used to gauge difficulty.
The size of the audience is used for evaluating success.
Familiarity is used to assess athleticism.
As a result, the sport is always fighting for its own survival.
That struggle becomes even more apparent outside of the United States. As a European athlete in one of the world’s most stereotypically American sports, I often find myself explaining and justifying the existence of the sport. In many countries, the sport lacks both visibility and recognition, forcing others just like me to uphold something that ought to be self-evident.
I started cheer at thirteen, an age considered late by most athletic standards within the sport. Before that, I spent years in ballet, another practice based on evaluation. When moving sports, I thought I had finally escaped the measurements. Although they weren’t the same, they never left me and I was met with another form of them. Athletes in cheerleading are evaluated based on public opinion in addition to score sheets.
I’ve remembered one conversation for years.
I once asked someone if they thought of me as an athlete. I was training six to seven times a week at the time to get ready for Worlds.
“Kind of,” he replied.
The answer wasn’t harsh. It was truthful. That’s exactly what made it memorable.
It emphasized how easily assumptions and lack of knowledge can outweigh effort.
Perhaps that is precisely why my favourite memory related to cheer isn’t the first time I hit the Worlds stage, or when I got the skill I fought so hard for, but rather when we finished competing and one of my teammates had thanked me for my contribution to the team. She spoke about the skills I fought not only my body, but my mind to complete, the mental blocks I had overcome, and the effort that rarely appeared on score sheets. For the first time, I felt recognized beyond a number.
I learned something from that experience that scores could never teach me: measurement itself is not the issue, rather its the selection of the incorrect ruler.
The fact that fewer people are familiar with a sport does not make it easier.
Fewer viewers do not diminish an accomplishment.
And, an athlete is not defined by stereotypes that other people make about them.
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