When my daughter first became interested in cheerleading, I enrolled her with a town cheer program that was thought of by many to be one of the best around.

As the season progressed, my daughter whole-heartedly enjoyed the experience.

She loved being with her friends, enjoyed performing at the games, and when it was time to put on an exhibition at the State town cheer competition, she was REALLY into it.

As we were at that competition, a local All Star team was exhibiting in between team performances.

As enjoyable as it was being at the competition that day, for some reason the All Star athletes REALLY seemed impressive.

My daughter, upon contemplating what she had been witnessing observing one of the All Star athletes during one of their tumble passes, looked at me, looked back at the All Star athlete, looked back at me again and said (paraphrasing), “I want to do THAT!!”, as she was pointing to the athlete finishing up their pass.

I quickly looked forward without making a sound but immediately shifting the look in my face to that of being highly inquisitive and asking to myself, “What was this All Star Cheer thing after all??”.

After leaving that day, I promised we would look into All Star Cheer and proceeded to do so with my daughter.

After a short review of what was required to join, I signed her up.

My daughter quickly took to the sport as she was shifted to the gym’s competitive teams.

The season went on and before you knew it, they were competing.

When I first attended the Town Cheer’s “Showcase” right before the State competition, I was uber-impressed by the teams I saw compete to the point where I literally had chills and my eyes actually welted up and got a bit watery.

The feeling I had at the first showcase though, paled in comparison however to the overwhelming sense that I experienced when at my first real, deal All Star comp.

If you have never been to an All Star Cheer Competition before, I assure you, it is a whole other planet from anything you have witnessed before.

As I was attending that first event, I could not quite put my finger on it, but I definitely felt this larger sense of “something” that I had not felt before…eerie!!!

These days I often find myself working to describe the difference between town or school cheerleading and All Star Cheer.

Taking the obvious cost of being involved out of the equation, the differences are still vast.

There are elements that certainly are similar.

In both there is the traditional tumbling, stunting, jumps, pyramid, and dance.
In All Stars, unlike the other factions of the cheer world, there is VERY little, if any, actual vocalized “cheering”.

All Stars, at least in what I have seen, particularly when it comes to Full-Year competition, often takes the very nature of cheerleading to a whole other level.

I would never say that one of these variations of Cheer are “better” than the others.

After being involved in the sport for many years at this point, I truly believe that there are various types of cheer (even different factions & gyms within All Stars to further the example) that are “best” fits for each individual athlete.

Perhaps one of the larger examples of differences between All Stars and the other types are the differences in coaching.

Where the majority of town and school cheer programs are staffed by volunteer (or minimally compensated) coaches, many All Star Cheer programs have coaches running their programs whose entire ‘job’ it is to work the program.

I was very fortunate when my daughter was involved in town cheer.

She was able to be part of a well-developed program that had systems in place to help ensure their program’s overall success on a year in and year out basis.

Not every town or school is as fortunate.

The caliber of athlete, overall, seems to be a bit higher in All Star Cheer than other factions as well.

This is not a blanket statement because there are phenomenal athletes across ALL verticals of cheer.

At the end of the day, it certainly is up to the individual as to what the best fit is in terms of type of cheer they decide to pursue; because when all is said and done, the athlete’s heart truly has to be “in it”, if not, things for all involved will NOT work out in the long run.