Teach your Team the Cheers

When I have my team together, I want to do my best to make practices productive. I learned early as a coach that spending practice time teaching sideline cheers was not a productive use of time. This time together as a team can be spent incorporating stunts into the cheers, advancing your stunts, working on tumbling and other skills that involve the entire team.

Knowing all of your cheers is very important, but there are ways you can teach them and still make your practices productive. Here are the steps you can take to make sure your entire team knows all of your cheers before school starts.

1. Make a list of all the cheer words.

2. Put all your cheers on video.

• Block out some time with two of your seniors who know all of the cheers and have great motions.
• Put a video camera or your phone on a tripod. If you use your phone, make sure to turn it landscape so it appears wide screen. However, it is highly recommended you use a video camera because it will take up a lot of memory.
• Record the cheers straight through to avoid the need to edit. Or, push pause after a certain number of cheers to give the cheerleaders a breather.
• One cheerleader should face the camera. One should have her back to the camera, so the person viewing the video can see the motions from the front and the back.
• Demonstrate the cheer at full speed once through.
• Demonstrate the cheer in slow motion 1-3 times through.
• Demonstrate the cheer again in full speed.
• You don’t need to “teach” the cheer. Cheerleaders can learn at their own pace by hitting pause and rewind. If there is a complicated motion, then at the end have one of your cheerleaders note how to do the motion and then move on to the next cheer.
• Do all of the cheers in the same order as your list.
• Rather than re-recording your cheer video each year, just edit out cheers you may not be doing anymore and add new cheers to the end of the video.

3. Share your video.

You can share your video in a number of ways.

• Share as a private video on You Tube with a password.
• Share as a Dropbox link.
• Get a free hightail.com account and email it to your team.
• Burn you video to a DVD so they can learn on their TV.

4. Set deadlines.

Set deadlines throughout the summer for when the cheers should be learned. Let’s say you have 99 cheers, you can set that they must know 33 cheers by June 15, 33 by July 15, and 33 by August 15. Leading up to each date, you can have one practice for new cheerleaders who don’t know the cheers. At these practices, review the cheers and make sure they learned them from the video correctly. On June 15, line up your entire team (new and returning) and call out the cheers. See who knows them.

5. Have captain practices.

While you don’t want to encourage practices without a coach present, there is nothing wrong with the captains having new cheerleaders over to their homes just to practice cheers together. This can be very encouraging to the new team members and can create bonding. Make sure your captains are not stunting and tumbling with them!

6. Make them accountable.

If a cheerleader does not know the cheers by the set dates, let them know they will not be involved in stunting until they know them. At the practices while everyone else is stunting, they will have to work on the cheers instead. This can be a motivator to get them to learn. You can also say based on how well they know the cheers, will determine their placement in formations. Whatever you decide to do to create some accountability, you need to be sure to stick with what you set.

Now that you have freed up some time at practices, think about what skills you want your team to master and go for it!

Do you need cheers?  You can check out some CCA cheers on our website! Click here. 

We also have a full season of cheers and dances as well as transitional stunts.  You can get a whole season of material for the price of sending one cheerleader to camp.  Check out Season One Here.  Save $60 by using the coupon code SAVE60.