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The speaker, Sophia Bowden, discusses the challenges faced by cheerleaders in high school. She explains that cheerleading is not considered a sport and therefore does not receive funding like other sports teams. This lack of funding prevents cheer teams from competing and providing proper training and equipment, leading to a higher risk of injuries. Sophia argues that if cheerleading were recognized as a sport, it would receive the necessary funding, allowing for safer practices and better coaching. She suggests that schools should start allowing boys to join cheer teams to address Title IX concerns and demonstrate the value and importance of cheerleading. Ultimately, Sophia believes that recognizing cheerleading as a sport will lead to safer practices and better opportunities for cheerleaders. Imagine this. You're at a homecoming football game for your high school, the biggest game of the season. The enthusiastic yells from the student section are the only thing you can hear while you're looking at the blaring stadium lights overhead and watching the big scoreboard count on the minutes until the game begins. A few minutes before kickoff, the cheerleaders and band head onto the field to perform the national anthem and a few crowd involvements to get the crowd riled up and ready for the game. After the game starts, the cheerleaders take their position on the track to cheer on the football team, but who pays attention to them anyways, right? Hi, I'm Sophia Bowden and you're listening to Cheerocracy, the podcast about all things cheer. I was a cheerleader in high school, so I know all about standing under the stadium lights, cheering on my team and the student section. When I was in high school, no one really cared about the cheerleaders and they kind of just pushed us to the side, students and faculty alike. I think that no one really gave us a second thought because honestly, we didn't really do anything worthwhile. We didn't win championships that gave us the flag to hang in the gyms like our wrestling team and we didn't really perform anything to wow the crowd enough to make them pay that much attention to us. My whole time on the cheer team, I wondered why we didn't compete more. I always thought it was because my coaches just didn't want to put in the effort to compose a competition winning routine. After doing some research, I realized that's not the case at all. The main reason we didn't compete is because we simply didn't have the funding. My next question was, well why don't we have the funds but other sports do? That's when I learned that it's because cheer isn't even considered a sport and only sports teams can get funding from school districts. So naturally, I kept going down my rabbit hole of research into why cheer wasn't considered a sport when I knew how hard the cheerleaders worked and what I found out was it was mainly because it didn't fit the Title IX requirements of a sport. Now, like most people, I didn't know the Title IX requirements until I started looking into it. And personally, I think that Rachel Greenspan put it best in her Time article when she said, the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students. Basically, Title IX requirements say that there has to be equal opportunity for all students to participate in a sport, which is why sports usually have a boys and a girls team, so that everyone has equal opportunity to participate. Since cheerleading is mainly girls, the lawmakers deem cheerleading to go against these laws. One problem that arises in talking about cheer violating Title IX requirements is that teams have a hard time letting boys join the team because if they did, they would have to have separate dressing rooms for times when they go out of town and in some school districts, boys and girls even have to be separated when driving at night, which would mean they'd have to have extra cars. All of these things are hard for teams to accommodate because having all these extra things is very difficult when they don't have the funds for it. If cheerleading were to become a sport and get funding, it would be far easier for them to have boys join the team because they would worry less about expenses that they don't have the money for. So you may be asking yourself, why is it a problem that cheerleading isn't considered a sport? Well, it's a problem for a lot of reasons, the main one being the amount of injuries that cheerleaders sustain at practice. Many people don't realize how dangerous cheer actually is. Practicing and performing stunts is the most dangerous part of cheerleading. Stunting consists of a group of people throwing one person into the air and catching them in their arms when they come back down. Getting thrown into the air sounds pretty dangerous, right? As Brittany McNamara said in her article from Vogue, cheerleading is the cause of 70.8% of direct catastrophic injuries to the girl athletes from 1982 to 2009, and those are just the catastrophic. Injuries. These injuries can range from a broken arm to traumatic brain injuries. People get these injuries for a variety of reasons, some being that they don't have the right equipment to protect them, they don't have properly trained coaches who can tell them what to do in the right way, and they don't have the correct knowledge on how to perform a stunt properly. All of these reasons as to why stunts can cause injuries can boil down to pretty much one thing. Since cheer isn't a sport, they can't get the funding to have access to knowledge about stunts, and they can't properly train coaches or athletes. Since coaches aren't trained properly, they can essentially set their athletes up for failure because they aren't teaching them the essential, proper, and safe techniques. Most of the time, schools can't get pre-qualified coaches because the salary for them is so low. Coaches don't make very much money because all of the money they do make comes from the athletes themselves paying their fees. If cheer were to be considered a sport, they could get more funding to pay coaches and more qualified coaches would apply and get the positions, resulting in lower injury rates to these athletes. Now, I've thought of cheerleaders getting injured multiple times and how we can minimize these injuries, but it all really comes back to the fact that cheerleading isn't considered a sport. For cheerleaders to have the opportunity to be a sport and get the funding that is needed, change first needs to be made in individual high schools. Cheer teams need to first start to allow boys to be on the teams, even if it means their fees will be higher for a year or two. If the school district sees that boys are not able to be part of the teams, making it not a Title IX violation, they will have to look more in depth at the cheer team as a whole and all that they do. When the district sees how much cheerleaders do and they can't fall back on their Title IX argument, I think that they will make high school cheerleading a sport so that everyone can be safer and earning the wage and credit they deserve.