They are both called cheer teams, but football and basketball cheer couldn’t appear more different. Within the activity, there are distinct styles, techniques and cultural influences that reflect their performance environments.
The largest difference between the basketball and football cheer programs is their approach to the technique of cheering. At White Station High School (WSHS), football cheer focuses on traditional cheerleading, with an emphasis on stunting, which is the athletic act of lifting, tossing or holding teammates in various poses in the air.
“Football cheer, I would say it’s a lot of stunting. It’s more kind of traditional cheers,” football cheerleader Harmony Owens (12) said. “We’re really kind of doing more rally cheers. We’re doing more [to] get the crowd pumped.”
While basketball cheer also incorporates stunts in their performances, the closed environment of a basketball court allows them to explore different moves that the football cheer team cannot, such as stomp and shake, which is a style featuring powerful body movements, sharp stomps and dramatic chants.
“Basketball is a hybrid team. So hybrid is like a mix of traditional and stomp and shake,” basketball cheerleader Kalice Woods (12) said. “Stomp and shake … stems from HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). It stems from, you know, Black culture.”
The stomp and shake originated in the 1970s in North Carolina and Virginia at HBCUs, combining the athleticism of cheer with cultural expression. For the team, including both stomp-and-shake and traditional cheer methods means more than diversifying cheerleaders’ techniques.
“I feel like it’s really about representing the different cultures,” Woods said. “At White Station, you have so many different cultures, and I think the fact that we decided to do both traditional and stomp and shake was just a way of representing, you know, we can do more than one type of cheer because we represent different cultures.”
The physical demands differ between the programs as well. Both require stamina and strength, but they vary in how they train.
“Our practices are literally stunting,” Owens said. “We usually do a lot of weight training and just a lot of weird drills to prepare us for stunting.”
On the other hand, basketball cheer incorporates track style conditioning because of their coach, a 2021 White Station graduate who ran track. The team ran two miles before each two-hour practice, though when the season started the distance was reduced to accommodate more dance and stunt related training.
“Our coach was actually on the track team, so we do a lot of track conditioning and a lot of track workouts and stuff,” Woods said. “We do a lot of body weight exercises—pushups, like the general stuff. A lot of core exercises.”
Aside from physical strength, control of the voice is important for both football and basketball cheer. Both types of cheerleaders have to project their voices deeply and from the chest to avoid straining and losing them during games.
“For us [basketball cheer], we have to over-pronounce our words so they can sound like words,” Woods said. “It’s like … ‘Are you saying the words?’ Because if you’re not saying [them], we get in trouble for that.”
Despite their differences, a central aspect of both the basketball and football cheer programs is their focus on community. Cheerleaders and coaches often have relationships beyond training and many take on the role of being parental figures in a school environment.
“The community that I get from being on the cheer team [is my favorite part],” Owens said. “And, just being able to collaborate with so many young women that are passionate about the same thing [is my favorite].”