One of the more potentially confusing things that a family newer to All Star Cheerleading may come across, is the term D1 vs. D2 as it relates to describing All Star Cheer gyms.
This can be especially confusing when people hearing the term are used to traditional D1/D2 descriptors as they relate to collegiate or other groupings in sports.
Many times, even parents that have been involved in the sport of All Star Cheer for years do not realize the difference.
As an example, perhaps one of the more comical things an All Star Cheer coach from a D2 gym can hear, is a parent saying that their athlete is a ‘D1 athlete’ and should be at a ‘D1 gym’.
This may be followed by a confusing look from the coach, with very good reason.
D1 & D2 translate into ‘Division 1’ and ‘Division 2’.
The only thing that these terms refer to is the size of the program under the guidelines of the United States All Star Federation (USASF).
Gyms whose total number of USASF registered athletes (between their Full-Year and Half-Year programs) that equal 125 or less are a Division 2 gym.
A program with 126 or more USASF registered athletes is a Division 1 gym.
Literally, that is all that is to it.
There are tons of D2 programs throughout USASF whose caliber of athletes is super high in comparison to the D1 programs that may be in their neighboring geographic area.
The number of athletes that work toward the 125 threshold is the combination of the athletes of all the gym locations that a program may have.
If a program has 7 different locations throughout the country and one of its locations has 30 athletes in it, that location is still considered a D1 gym because of the sum total of all of the program’s athletes.
The purpose of dividing the Divisions this way, has always been to help keep things as competitive as possible and allow the sport as a whole to grow at a healthy pace.
In other words, in theory, how fair would it be for a gym just starting out with 15 athletes to have to be matched in competition against a team drawn from a gym that has numerous locations and hundreds of athletes to choose from?
While there are exceptions and this team of 15 could very well be filled with a super strong, diverse level of athletes with a superstar coach and viably go head-to-head with the larger gym, this would definitely be a rare occurrence.
As a gym gets stronger as time goes by and begins to grow, the natural transition is to a Division 1 program when they are large enough to do so.
While not certain why the number was set at 125, that is the number that was chosen once upon a time and has been the dividing line for quite some time.
Many times at competitions, D2 gyms are pitted against D1 programs and this all being said, they often hold their own, if not surpass, the quality of the routines and performances of the D1 program they are going against in one way, shape, or form.
On the flipside of everything, this can easily happen because as a gym gets larger, it is easy for its pool of athletes to cause the gym’s coaching pool of talent to thin out and not be able to be evenly spread out over all the teams in a program.
Whereas the D2 gym is able to be laser-focused, often with very good quality coaching and hence why some of the best actual performances in the country typically come out of D2 gyms, especially on the more beginner levels.
Furthermore, this is true because with the D1 gyms, their more higher caliber coaches tend to work with their higher-level teams, where in the D2 gyms, the staff tends to work on teams throughout the gym at a much more even clip.
While it surely is easy to get caught up in the discussion of D1 vs. D2 in a way that makes folks who truly know the meaning of the difference between the two (again simply the 125 dividing line) shake their head, it is also refreshing to know that there are many who “get it” and are equally educated on the parent side of things and are able to avoid getting caught up in a conversation that can be bewildering to folks truly in the know overhearing the discussion.
