One of the more difficult decisions every serious high school age athlete participating in the sport of cheerleading may be faced with at one point or another, is having to choose between participating in cheering for their High School or participating in All Star Cheer.
This could come at a variety of time periods over one’s high school career, often when entering as a Freshman, but many times as many talented athletes are becoming Upper Classmen and wanting to become more involved with their school.
While this is typically socially-driven, many athletes work to convince themselves that cheering for their high school is the best route to allow them to cheer in college and though once upon a time, this may very well have been true, these days the exact opposite is often the case.
If someone wants to cheer for their high school because socially it is really what they want to do – i.e. be with their friends, be able to say they cheered for their high school when they get older, etc. – then certainly that is the road that may very well make the most sense for them.
If cheering in college is something that is the driving force behind the decision though, choosing high school cheer may actually hinder their potential.
After working through the social element as it relates to deciding to cheer in high school and assuming that is not playing as big a role in the decision as the wanting to cheer in college is, then the next item to work through is whether they want to cheer more so on a ‘Sideline Cheer’-oriented college team or on more of a ‘Competitive’-oriented college team.
If your athlete strictly wants to participate in college on a ‘Sideline’ level, then High School cheer may certainly be a more viable option as in All Stars (as crazy as it may sound to those unfamiliar with the sport) there is actually VERY little parallel to Sideline cheer (example – there are rarely pom poms, vocal cheers, and other elements which are typically synonymous with Sideline Cheer).
However, if your athletes is driven by the glamour, glitz, and excitement of a college that competes competitively, then choosing All Star Cheer over High School Cheer may very well be the best option.
Similar to many other club sports (soccer, basketball, volleyball, and the like), if selecting All Stars, then the athlete very well may not be allowed to participate in or be very limited in (either by the school or the All Star program they are involved with) High School cheer at that point.
Although a case can definitely be made that there are some extraordinarily talented high school cheer programs across the land, with few exceptions, can they truly rival the product that is put on the mat from a competitive standpoint of the most professionally guided All Star Cheer programs.
Again, in yesteryear the opposite may have been true when college cheer programs actively recruited from the ranks of high school cheer teams and though this absolutely still occurs, with the advent of many high school programs working to align their competitive teams’ routines to be more along the lines of being as close as possible as to what one might expect to see from an All Star cheer team, the proof definitely seems to be in the pudding.
All one has to do is glance up and down the rosters of what are looked at as the most competitive college teams in the land and the All Star cheer presence that exists simply cannot be overlooked.
Making the choice of which path to choose may be quite easy for some and excruciatingly difficult for others.
At the end of the day, it is important to consider all the variables when making the decision and to be sure that the information the decision is based on is aligned with the reality of what things are in this day and age vs. what they may have been up until the more relatively recent times in the past.
