FINALLY, A SPORT WORTH CHEERING ABOUT!

BY DANIELLE HARDER

Stephanie Ross-Alouche tried everything to get her eldest daughter interested in sports. Nothing caught the 15-year-old's attention - until cheerleading came along.
"She did nothing. She would not step into an activity for a long time," according to the Pickering mother. "She walked in her first day to recreational cheerleading and she walked out afterwards and the first thing she said is 'Can I join the competitive team now?' She started training that night, in her room, doing toe touches."

Cheerleading is a family sport these days. Ross-Alouche's three oldest children - five, 11 and 15 - compete, and the three-year-old is starting soon in the Munchkin program. Although there is a shortage of statistics on how many people compete in the sport in Canada, the opening of the country’s largest cheer gyms in Pickering last fall is an indication of its growing popularity.

Ultimate Canadian Cheer has been in business for five years, but moved into an 18,000 square foot studio last November to keep up with demand. The gym is about three times the size of many cheer studios. Owner Doug Martin says cheerleading is a growth sport.

“It’s becoming mainstream in the same way as soccer did quite a while ago,” he says. “There was availability, then people became involved and then word of mouth happened and then everybody said I’m going to get my kid involved in this

Cheerleading is often associated with football and high school. Today, that couldn’t be further from reality. There are at least 78 cheer clubs across Canada – many in Ontario – as well as dozens of high school and university level teams.

Martin says cheerleading offers something many competitive sports don’t. “There is no perfect body type in cheerleading,” he says. “We need little girls to lift. We need bigger, stronger girls to lift them. We need tall girls to stabilize. We need all shapes, all body sizes. There’s nobody who walks in our front door who can’t be successful at this.”

Including boys, according to Ross-Alouche. She says while it’s still a predominantly female sport, cheerleading is beginning to attract more young men and boys, including her 11-year-old son.

“He’s the kid who plays soccer, basketball, football – he’s played everything else,” says Ross-Alouche. “This year, he said ‘I’m doing this mom.’ He walked right in there and he felt very included. No one feels like they can’t do it.”

Ross-Alouche says cheerleading brings out confidence. Her younger daughter who, at five, was “not a performer child” rushed to the front of the stage in one of her first competitions. “They made it so much fun,” she says. “She ran right out to the front waving at everybody. There were hundreds of people out there and she just had no problem.” Cheerleading is as rigorous a sport. Today’s cheerleaders are fit, trained athletes. Their skills lie in acrobatics, stunts, gymnastics and precision choreography and, of course, their cheers. They compete across Canada and the U.S. at varying degrees of competition.

“We’ve got plenty of kids in our program whose parents rave about how much more fit their kids are now than they were before they started with us,” says Martin.

That fitness can come with a steep price tag for competitive cheerleaders: several thousand dollars a year for those competing at the highest level on several teams in competitions. Gone are the days of a pair of running shoes and pom-poms. By the time parents pay for the outfits, travel and lessons, cheerleading can be as expensive as figure skating. That’s why Martin opened such a large facility. He’s expanding his program to start with children as young as five and open up opportunities for kids to drop in to try cheerleading for fun or sign up for a single session.

He hopes that one day competitive cheerleading will be as popular in Canada as the U.S., where competitive cheerleading took off in the mid-1980s. It only really gained ground in Canada over the past decade. Ross-Alouche has no fears.

“This is what my family does now,” she says with a smile. She expects many other families will soon find something to cheer about, too.

Danielle Harder is a freelance writer in Whitby, who also teaches healthy eating cooking classes. You can reach her at danielleharder@rogers.com

10.06.08