Cheers vs. Chants in Cheerleading

Series Summary

Cheerleading was invented by a man in 1898, who first directed a crowd in cheering on the University of Minnesota. Since then, cheerleading has become a popular cultural phenomenon and a sport. Cheerleaders began as a male activity but slowly females, who had few offerings for collegiate-level athletics, dominated cheerleading. In the early 1970s, the Dallas Cowgirls changed the emphasis of professional cheerleading to dance, removing most of the stunts and tumbling in favor of revealing outfits and choreography. In the early 1980s, cheerleading as a competitive sport, became popular. Stunts and gymnastics also gained in popularity for high school teams. Now there are many official styles of cheering, both amateur and pro, and local spins. In this free video series, learn some basic cheerleading cheers from an experienced cheerleader. Find out how to do both defensive and offensive cheers. Also, by alternating pom-poms, fist, feet and jumps, variety can be added to cheers. A cheerleader explains how to perform basic go cheers: G-O Go, Go Go Go, Go Fight Win and more. Also, learn to do basketball and football cheers. Improve crowd participation, find out how to lead a Yell Out and show team spirit, by learning some simple cheers today!

Video Transcript

"Now that we're warmed up and ready to go we're going to get to the fun stuff. Cheers and chants are basically what cheerleaders do to get the crowd pumped up and involved in the game you're watching. Whether it's basketball, football or competition we're going to use these cheers though out the game, at time outs and also at half time. The first things we're going to learn are called chants. Chants are short cheers that we can do during the game to get the crowd excited. We're going to repeat the chant three times after it's called out and then it's finished. A cheer is something that we're going to save for full time outs, a quick 30 second timeout or half time. Some times we use pompoms in our cheers. It depends on what kind of hand motions we're doing. If we're using blades, we're never going to pick up our pompoms. If we have cheers that we learned with fists, we can go ahead and use our pompoms for an extra effect. With these cheers I'm going to teach, I'm going to use the colors green and gold. And the mascot bobcats. Whatever your school squad is you can go ahead and fill in those colors and mascots to make the cheers appropriate for your school."