All About Formations for Cheerleading

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Lucy Spain on behalf of Expert Village. I'm going to show you some cheer leading squad cheers today. We're going to talk about chants, and I'm going to demonstrate some that you can take to your squad. Once we've learned our cheers and we're ready to go out on the football, basketball field or competition floor, we're going to need to know how to stand in relevance to the rest of our team. Now the most basic formation, that's appropriate for basketball and football games, is going to be a stagger. Basically, a stagger is going to be one person has a line of back row people and then there's going to be a line of front row people and the back row people are going to designate the spots and then the front row people are going to be in what we like to call the "windows", so everyone can be seen. These are great because if you're on a track, you've got a very slim space that you can be on, so two lines works out perfectly. Also when we're cheering on the basketball sidelines, we have an even smaller space to be so we're definitely going to want to go with this formation. Now another formation that you're going to use, if you're on a co-ed squad, is going to be standing directly in front of your partner. Now, usually your partner is going to be about a foot taller than you, so their head is going to be able to be seen over yours. You want to stand a couple of feet in front of them. We also want to make sure when we're getting ready with our formations, we want to have an arms length to the left and an arms length to the right. This is to insure that when we're doing any of our movements or kicks that no one is going to get injured. Now, when it comes to floor cheers or competitions, we can get a lot more interesting with our formations. Two of the most popular ones are going to be "V"'s and reverse "V"'s. Now, another cool thing that you can do with formations is have levels. As we can see, you can do a "V" with one girl in the front and branch out or you can do a "V" with one person in the back and branch forward. Now there's lots of different levels we're going to use when we're in these formations. The lowest one is going to be the person down on their knees. This would definitely be the person in the front so other people can be seen. After the knees, we can do a kneeling position, which is nice if you want to stagger off to an angle. Then, of course, we're going to have our standing position. Sometimes you can also, if you're close enough, do positions where you lean forward on the person in front of you, rest your hands on their shoulders. And last, but not least, the tallest level can be formed with stunts which we're going to build, build, build and make the furthest level back the tallest level."