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...
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