Spicy Cheers

It's a chilly Friday night, and the varsity cheerleaders of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., can see their breath as they cheer for their football team, the Vikings. The girls bounce, tumble and lift smaller members onto human towers. The Viking princesses wear their hair in neat ponytails, scrubbed faces straining with smiles, voices rubbed raw with exertion. A girl with springs for legs does backflips along the edge of the field. "We didn't do stunts like this when I was a cheerleader, many moons ago," sighs Brenda LeGrand, their coach.

In fact, a look at modern cheerleading reveals that it bears about as much resemblance to parents' memories of the perky sideliners as Chubby Checker does to Beyonce Knowles. As any viewer of ESPN's popular National High School Cheerleading Championships knows, contemporary cheerleading is part rigorous sport and part Vegas-style entertainment. The tension between the two is prompting schools, communities and national cheerleading associations to lay down some guidelines about what is and what is not acceptable along the sidelines.

Some of the biggest wheels in the cheer business (known as the "spirit" industry) are the increasingly popular "All-Star" competitive squads, which are run out of private gyms, often as part of gymnastic clubs. All-Stars are the flashy fringe of the cheering world; because they are privately run and unencumbered by school affiliation, the squads blur the boundaries between spectacular gymnastics, outrageous stunts, cheer and dance. They have helped make competitive cheer the fastest-growing women's sport in the country. The squads exist to practice, perform and compete, and have popularized an in-your-face style of cheering and seductive dance movements that have alarmed some adults.

Joyce Whitaker, vice president of Cheerleaders of America, says that after 15 years as a competition judge, she recently has seen routines that she feels were way too sexy. "We don't want to see squads 'humping' the floor, thrusting their pelvises and slapping their butts," she says. "Sometimes I'll tell a squad after competition, 'You're really good, but you really need to tone down your suggestive moves.'" Some cheer associations have adopted guidelines telling squads they will be penalized in competition for such movements, for inappropriate clothing and for "slashing"--a particularly aggressive form of cheering that has squads more or less taunting the audience with body movements and hand gestures.

Dawn Pierson, coach of the Northeast Ohio All Stars, says her squads push the envelope, both athletically and in terms of their moves, but not so much as they used to. "A lot of All-Star teams are re-evaluating their 'thrusting'--competition judges don't want to see fourth-graders out there bumping and grinding."

Techniques popular at All-Star squads have filtered into the tamer world of high school sideline cheer through camps, videos and the movie Bring It On, a cult favorite among high schoolers about cheerleading in California. But many schools prohibit the elaborate mounts, stunts, flying and dancing that All-Star squads work to perfect. And while the National Federation of State High School Associations annually updates its guidelines about safety, appropriate apparel and dance moves, it is up to communities to enforce them.

In Savannah, Ga., the cheerleading squad at Johnson High School had to alter some routines when the Savannah-Chatham County school board received complaints that their routines contained lewd gestures. Crystal Tyson, 15, captain of the Johnson squad, says the girls were inspired by music videos and a summer cheering clinic to choreograph their routines, including a certain dance move. "The school board called it a 'pelvic thrust,'" she says.

Now the Savannah school board will vote on revising an existing policy to include a clause prohibiting "lewd gestures ... and suggestive or vulgar movements" on the part of any school performer. And, board member Lori Brady says, "that includes the chess club."