Where I’m from, cheerleaders are known to be a squad full of girls. There are barely any squads that you’ll see that has boys, unless they’re a competitive cheerleading squad. The squads where I’m from perform many different stunts but nothing like what cheerleaders do in college. College cheerleading and high school cheerleading are totally different in many ways. They are different when it comes to competing and even when it comes to cheerleading at football games. There are many different things you have to do as a cheerleading adjusting from high school to cheerleading for a college squad.

It all starts with practices and tryouts for cheerleading. In high school you usually try out for different season during different times of the school year. Football tryouts were around May and basketball tryouts were around November. The high school I went to our football squad was also our competitive cheerleading squad. This usually contained about 12 girls, which in competitions would be considered a small varsity squad. Usually there were more girls who tried out for basketball then football but the squad would be about 10 girls. For the football squad we usually practiced a couple weeks out the summer just to get ready for competition season. On the courts and on the mats, we were only limited to do certain stunts depending on the level of difficulty. Our pyramids could only be one level high and we had to have connection with all flyers at all times. This gave us a limit on what we could do for difficulty in our stunts. Coming to competitions you would normally see the same stunts and pyramids but just in different combinations. There was never a squad that did stunts you never seen before. If there was, it’s because it might have been a big competition like states or nationals.

College cheerleading differs from high school cheerleading in many ways. When you see college cheerleaders, you normally see boys and girls, its unusual that you’ll see college cheerleaders with a squad of girls only, unless it’s not a big school or D1 school, then it’s more likely. Also college squads are usually huge, so huge that they all can’t cheer in the same spot. You will normally see them split one half will hit one side of the crowd, and the other half will hit the other side of the crowd. Also, a college cheerleading squad is all year round and usually cheers for every sport. Another thing that is different between the two is that college cheerleaders are allowed to do almost any stunt in the book. At games or competition, you will see them doing pyramids two levels high or sometimes three level high. Not all the time does the flyer have to be connected with the bases and not all the time will the flyer have four bases under her. Sometimes it could be only, or two. When you go to a college competition you will always see a variety of stunts you never seen before. Little things like the difficulty of stunts and the genders on the squads is what differs high school cheerleading from college cheerleading.