How to Coach Cheerleading

Video Transcript

"Patience. Lots and lots of patience. And you'd be surprised. Like, you would think the littler the child is, the younger the child is, the more patience is needed, which is true when you're four or five or six years old. But I...my favorite I used to coach, I'd say, is like eleven to fourteen, because they just want to please you. They want to do everything in their power to please you. Once you're fourteen, your body starts, kind of, declining a little bit as a girl, and you probably learned the most amount of stuff you're going to be able to have your body do, if you've been doing it since you were little, five and six years old. And your body starts shutting down. You don't understand it, and so it becomes a little bit harder to understand what it's like to just try, try, try all the time. And so, eleven, twelve years old, they can do routines over and over without even breathing hard. It takes a lot of time. If you're...a good coach will go home at night and troubleshoot and figure out, you know, why something they tried the night before didn't work. They know how to communicate to their athletes and how to encourage them. We do things all the time. Like, we play different kinds of games just to keep their attention. You know, we make it competitive within the stunt groups to try to make sure that they're doing everything they can to not let the people around them down. Not necessarily themself. And, we do pictures on the wall, where every great routine you do in the gym you get to fill in a piece of the picture until the whole thing's done. So we do competition between teams that way, and it's just a different way to try to find out how to gear them into trying their very hardest every minute they're in the gym."