For this blog, I thought I would go more in depth about what cheerleaders do at basketball games, since I only merely mentioned it in my last blog. Other than football, basketball is our next most popular sport. Men’s and women’s games are completely different experiences, and usually, very few students attend the women’s games at all. While the crowd levels and the excitement levels may be different, we typically do just about the same things at both games.

My whole team is never assigned to one basketball game, as that would be about 40 people in only small corner of the stadium! Each month our coach sends out a calendar with some basic rotation that switches off who cheers for what game. Typically, about four boys and sevens girls will be assigned to each game. Basketball is very interesting and VERY different than football. We typically arrive one hour before game time in order to warm up and eat. Yes, I said eat. I am not sure how many of you have ever been to a men’s basketball game, but they always serve free food before it, so you should definitely go. There are very few places to warm up so typically we have to warm up in a hallway, which is very difficult, especially when stunting.

After warmups, we go onto the court to make a tunnel for the players to run through. After that, we move to our side of the court, which is in the opposite corner. My favorite part of the football games are the pregame activities, however for basketball, pregame is much less exciting. Essential, we do not really do anything special at the beginning of the game- other than welcoming the team members.

One main difference between football and basketball is that we get to sit down. While this may seem nice, I would actually prefer standing because every time we score, we have to stand up, cheer, and sit back down, which can get a little bit repetitive when we score approx. 70 points a game. Another major difference is we only really get to stunt during timeouts, which is very different from the constant lifts and tricks we do all football game long. While I personally think it is more fun to do stunts throughout the game, more attention is on us when we do them on timeouts because we are in the center of the court. We have created many different formations and tricks that are flashy and exciting for the crowd to watch and even participate in, including things such as WE ARE and Rock and Roll chants.

Throughout basketball games, we also get to constantly do different things such as t-shirt tosses. It’s a much different experience cheering for basketball because you are so close to the fans and you can see all of them- usually during football you can only see the first few rows, unless you’re in a stunt. This allows you to better interact them as well as feel their excitement.

Another major difference between football and basketball is that we constantly are calling cheers. During football, we do a lot of dancing with only a few cheers here and there but since we are sitting we do a lot less dancing and a lot more cheering. Basketball games are also MUCH quicker than football games so we try and squeeze in just as much excitement as we would for football but in a smaller time period, so we are constantly busy. Although I find basketball games very fun, football will always be my favorite sport that I cheer for and football and basketball are very, very different.