Graphic by Callie Wohlgemuth ’21
BY CASEY ROEPKE ’21
Cheerleading has long been sideline entertainment, but now has finally attained its hard-earned spotlight with “Cheer,” a six-episode Netflix documentary series. The episodes follow the Navarro College cheerleading team through a period lovingly called “Daytona Season,” referring to the National Cheerleaders Association (NCA) Collegiate Cheer Championship in Daytona, Florida. Along the way, the series chronicles the life stories of the athletes.
“Cheer” is, above all, a demonstration of the incredible feats of athleticism that cheerleaders perform for this competitive varsity sport. Every episode is full of strong, muscular men (known as “bases” or “stunters”) throwing “flyers” — small girls with incredible flexibility and coordination — up to 20 feet in the air.
Midway through the second episode, Navarro cheerleading coach Monica Aldama calls one of her athletes over to ask a question. Lexi Brumback, a Navarro cheerleader with platinum blonde hair and a modest smile, jogs over and engages in a back-and-forth with a guest choreographer about tumbling, technique and other cheer jargon. The choreographer asks if she can try a “toe full two to whip full,” and Brumback bounds back out to the mat, carrying an assured confidence that, as the season continues, seems to mask an underlying imposter syndrome affecting nearly every cheerleader on the team.
The other students pause their conversations to look over, and Lexi takes half a breath. She jumps high into the air, her legs straight out in a perfect middle split, then lands and rebounds into a backwards flip, two back handsprings, a back layout and finishes with another flip, sticking the landing near-flawlessly and jogging back over to her coach. “That was a little slow, but I haven’t done it in a while,” she says, almost apologetically. She wants to learn how to perform it better.
For many of the athletes, Aldama is their first advocate. She encourages them to think beyond sports — about their future, their passions and their lives. She cares about the team as a whole, but also sees each individual for who they are. One cheerleader teared up in an interview, mentioning that Aldama had remembered her name in her Navarro cheer tryout.
In a small, conservative Texas town, Aldama fights the homophobia and religious conservativism aimed at her male cheerleaders, many of them gay men of color. Her ultimate focus is on winning the championship, not for herself, but to prove to her athletes that they are important and worthy of love.
One of the strengths of the show is the manner in which primary director Greg Whiteley (who also directed “Last Chance U,” a football docu-series, for Netflix) brings the audience into the world of elite cheerleading. Various interviewees emphasized over and over how exclusive the world of cheer is, with families shelling out thousands of dollars over years of children’s cheer camps and club team competitions — but also how isolated it is from other sports resources.
The first few episodes take great pains to teach viewers cheerleading vocabulary and history by including voiceovers from coaches and researchers, but by the third episode, the producers assume a certain level of fluency in cheer terms.
Many residents of Corsicana, Texas — the location of Navarro College, which has one of the best cheerleading programs in the country — are completely ignorant of the athletes who bring fame to their town year after year. Cheerleading is often unfairly characterized as entertainment instead of as a sport. To watch the NCA finals, viewers don’t turn to ESPN; they have to subscribe to a specific streaming service.
Aldama’s athletes are not strangers to being overlooked and underestimated, and not only on the competition mat. The show follows several athletes in detail, showing tragic upbringings full of abandonment and betrayal from families and peers. The editing of “Cheer” is close and intimate, often directly tying an athlete’s voiceover retrospect of their past trauma to present-day footage of them tumbling or catching, creating a visual of athletes overcoming obstacles.
Although “Cheer” portrays the injuries accumulated by teammates throughout the intensive training for Daytona, the show glosses over the pressure Aldama puts on her cheerleaders. In one practice, three girls fall to the ground and suffer injuries. Aldama’s response is to make the whole team do 50 push-ups for letting someone fall without catching them. The premise is that one person’s mistake plays out for the entire team; but NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour” points out that the only person not doing the push-ups with the team is Aldama herself.
Viewers never get to see Aldama take any real responsibility for the injury and pain her athletes endure and while injury is endemic to the entire sport of cheerleading, Aldama’s power over her athletes seems unique. Not only can she get athletes to practice on injured backs, ribs and ankles with just a stare but, more dangerously, Aldama’s athletes will self-direct themselves to do anything to gain her approval. Going to the emergency room between practices, hiding injuries from the athletic trainers and coaches and accumulating five concussions but still showing up to practice are all examples of the lengths Navarro cheerleaders go to prove themselves. Without Aldama telling them to take care of themselves, they learn to push themselves beyond a reasonable limit.
Despite never cheerleading, I found “Cheer” intensely relatable because of the similar pressures I experienced in dance. Growing up in classical ballet, I was taught to make dance look easy. Even as I was in excruciating pain, standing on my bleeding toes or hyperextending my limbs, I was supposed to smile (not too big), breathe (not too loudly) and curtsy (not too braggadociously). Each movement and performance was supposed to appear effortless, as though we simply drifted onstage. The consequence of looking as though you aren’t trying, though, is that the audience won’t appreciate just how hard you are working.
“I wouldn’t be mad if, like, no one remembered me,” Lexi, the best female tumbler on Navarro’s team, says after reflecting on her accomplishments. “Cheer” finally makes the case that she, and cheerleading as a whole, deserve a legacy.