High School How Long Should A H.s. Cheer Be?

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Dec 14, 2009
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I am new to H.S. cheerleading, and alittle curious about the cheer section. How long should it be? 5lines? How many times should a team shout out there team colors? (ex. Go black and white lets hear it.) I was recently at a comp. where it was so obvious the team was gasping for air while doing the cheer. As they continued to chant out there team colors, four times, I kind of felt bad for them. Just curious if your not all music, how long should your cheer be? Or what would be acceptable? tks
 
My team's cheer is about a minute long with 1:30 of music. We do motions, standing tumbling, jumps, and a stunt. We say our colors during our stunt I think we repeat our school colors 3 times. And we say our school's letters 3 or 4 times.
 
Check the competition guidelines.....some events require just 45 seconds, others a full 60. Also look at the score sheet. If it's the UCA score sheet, they're going to want the cheer to be simple, easy to follow, and using signs and poms to lead the crowd. Watch the UCA HS and College Nationals videos on the varsity site for examples. Kentucky's cheer is always a perfect example of crowd leading at the college level. Dunbar and Bob Jones always do a nice job at the High School level. For high school, they want to see you use stunts that will hit. If you have full ups that are a little shaky, put in straight extensions that are rock solid. The stunts should hit on the important words (Black, White, Go, Knights) to lead the crowd.
 
I have seen some teams (my school has done this to) where the cheer is apart of the music and around 5 8 counts?
 
I have heard that UCA would like your cheer to be so easy a caveman can understand it, so the crowd can really get into it. Tight motions and stunts, and not crazy difficulty that would distract the crowd from understanding and participating. Use signs, poms and megaphones. Usually our cheer is kinda like two cheer.. spell out the mascots or something, transtition, and then school colors.
 
It really does depend on the competition company. UCA focuses on leading the crowd and including props to help with that effect. NCA has a minute of long wordy cheer that the teams can tell their journey. USA is similar to the UCA style with all of the signs and such. Other state organizations or event producers only require a couple lines like an allstar routine or no cheer at all.
 
Depends on your state too. In illinois it has to be around a minute. But we do more of a story type cheer. Its not repeating colors and your name over and over. I think its much more interesting. They're also really fun to write. You should try it! here's an example:


The cheer starts at 1:17
 
I differentiate the two in my mind as : the UCA style is geared to the crowd (signs, repetition, simple to follow colors/letters to really get that audience involved and interested in the routine) and the NCA style is geared to the squad itself (long wordy cheer that can sometimes be hard to hear but the team saying it knows what the words are and its their story to feel proud and passionate about). Both can be great and fun in their own ways! :)
 
Depends on competition rules, however, I am a UCA fan for HS/College, you should be cheering your games and you should be leading the crowd....

BUT no judgement on other competition styles, I can enjoy and respect a great team who executes well no matter what their style. My advice is find out where you are competing and the rules and guidelines. Is it all music? Is it music and cheer seperate? If you compete multiple times what would best fit your area and the style? There are a lot of factors!
 
As a youth cheerleader, we always did the storybook type cheers, not a ton of crowd involvement. At the time, these always scored well. But now as a coach, we find in youth and HS cheer, they really are pushing the crowd involvement. We were in for a shock when our extremely difficult cheer that was a pretty well balanced mixed of story and crowd involvement got a 10/20 in our scores. We still won because most other teams had similar cheer scores, but the teams that only had call backs, signs, flags, banners, megaphones, pompoms, were getting perfect scores even with little difficulty.
 
I wish at a NCA cheer style comp you got a booklet with all the cheer or something, because they are pretty cool, but you cant fully appriciate (sp?) the cheer unless you can understand all the words or the story they are telling. IMO.
 
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