How to Do Basket Tosses: Cheerleading Stunt Tips

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Lucy Spain on behalf of Expert Village here to talk about cheerleading stunts. Now we're going to discuss a stunt called a basket toss. A basket toss, you're going to have your five basic people just like you would for any regular stunt, except for the format's going to be really different. Now your two bases, you're going to link arms in a pattern like this, which we're going to call the square. Now you're going to take one hand and clasp it over your other hand right in the middle of the forearm. It's really important that you've got a nice tight grip and you want to keep it pretty close together. The other person is then going to grab onto your forearm and your wrist so we create a nice square. Now this square needs to be really loose. You need to be able to do this, loosen your muscles up, make sure you've got a nice loose grip. Now you're flier is actually going to step onto your arms. The reason we call it a basket toss is because you're creating the basket for your flier to fly in. So once you've got the solid basket ready, your flier is ready to step in. Now we load into the basket the same way we load into a regular stunt. We can either do one foot at a time and then ride our basket. Or we can simply jump in our basket, whatever our squad feel more comfortable with, but everyone's basket toss needs to be the same. We also have a back spot in the basket toss. Their job is loading in and it gets really important here. We really need to make sure we push up on the bottom of the person who's flying, because that's where they're going to get about a third of their power from. Do not push them forward, because they're going to fly out of their basket and no one's going to be able to catch them. Now we also have a front spot in basket so we can get a little more power. The front spot, your job's pretty easy. You're going to get underneath the basket that your bases have created. Basically you're just going to give them a little extra power when they hit the peak of their basket. Your most important job is to step out of the way, because when that flier comes back down, if you stay in front, you're going to get smacked with her legs. So make sure after you push, you step out of the way, so your flier can come down. Now as a flier, the most basic ride you can do in a basket is a step in, and just ride it straight up 'til you hit your peak then you want to come down in the cradle position. Now your job as a flier is to make sure you get a lot of momentum pushing off those shoulders and straightening your legs at the same time. If you let your legs dip or you don't push out and sag, you're not going anywhere out of that basket. It's really really a power play between the arms and the bending of your knee; they really need to spring off each other. Now once we've mastered the basket toss, we can do a lot of cool things in them. Some of the most common are the toe touch once we've reached the top of our basket fly. We're going to go all the way up, ride it, hit a pretty toe touch, come back down in our cradle. The next step you'd want to master is doing your back tuck in your basket toss. Same principle as a basic back tuck, except for you're going to make sure that you do it at the tippy top of your basket. Now a lot of people, when they're learning a back tuck basket are going to want to back flip right out of it. You're not going anywhere, you're not getting any height, and you're going to hit your back spot right in the head. So you need to make sure you ride it like your basic basket, go all the way up, it's really important to make a spot on the wall and once you see yourself starting to go down from that spot is when you need to pull into your tuck. Now it's OK when you're learning if you don't make it all the way around. Your spots and your bases are going to catch you no matter what, but technically, we should do a full tuck and land in the cradle position."