Judge's ruling on cheerleading raises key issues

Is cheerleading a sport?

According to a federal judge, the answer is no for Title IX purposes. Quinnipiac University tried to argue that it could swap its women’s volleyball team for a competitive cheerleading squad.

Competitive cheerleading “is too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsityathletic opportunities for students,” the judge said in the ruling.

Mary Jo Kane, who is the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, smartly explained the situation to ABCNews.com: “How would people react if the school cut a men’s sport like baseball or lacrosse and used those funds for a male cheerleading squad?”

Quinnipiac tried to save tens of thousands of dollars by replacing women’s volleyball with cheerleading, ABCNews.com reported. Interestingly, more people would be able to participate on a cheerleading squad than on a volleyball team.

Let’s examine this further. If Quinnipiac’s argument is that more people can participate in cheerleading for a lower cost, then every sport the university offers should be held to the same standard, i.e., are we having the most people play for the lowest price?

And many colleges should be thinking about overhauling their sports programs. An NCAA report said that only 22 athletic departments in 120 Football Bowl Subdivision schools turned a profitin 2010.

If programs want to fix their athletic ledgers, changes must come from both male and female sports, equally.

I would be negligent if I did not speak in support of cheerleading, as well. The athletic merits of cheerleading go unquestioned. Watching some of the competitions on ESPN, it is clear that these young people are athletes.

With that in mind, I have to take an issue with this Kane comment to ABCNews.com: “No one wants to denigrate cheerleading, but should it be considered sport at the expense of legitimate women’s competitive team sports?”

I asked a friend who did cheerleading in high school about this and she took an issue with that statement, in particular the use of the word “legitimate.” She explained to me her team trained at five every morning, “just like swimmers do.” The workouts included weightlifting and mandatory gymnastics. Team members had to attend training camps in the summer, too.

She did tell me that while there are national and international competitions, there are inconsistencies in the evaluation of cheerleading programs – comments that support the judge’s ruling.

But I posit this: Gymnastics, boxing and figure skating routinely have scoring controversies.

This post is not taking a position on cheerleading’s merit as a sport. It is saying that a discussion needs to be had on deciding a definition for sports before we can say what is and more importantly what is not a sport.

-- Steve Bien-Aime

Tucker Center conference calls for change

Collaboration. Dialogue. Community building.

These were the mission statements that the Girls and Women in Sport and Physical Activity Conference participants committed to when they chose to gather for a full day of activities in the TCF Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, MN.

The Tucker Center of the University of Minnesota brought sports activists, scholars and students together for an out-of-the-ordinary, interactive and dynamic conference titled Creating Change that emphasized activism and practical application of research for a common goal to create a better environment for females in sports and physical activity.

A significant portion of the conference focused on media representations and problems with popular images of female athletes. The participants of the conference enthusiastically offered strategies for change centered around the goal to give female athletes a say in constructing their own images and representations.

Unsurprisingly, a hot topic of discussion was the emergence of new media that carry the potential for creating the kind of change scholars are looking for. Multiple presenters came to the conclusion that we need to use blogs to not only share our scholarship, but also to engage in a conversation with each other, as well as with the women and girls participating in sports.

Online sites are promising spaces for advocacy. To fulfill this promise, the conference hosts led by Dr. Nicole LaVoi, Associate Director of the Tucker Center, incorporated interaction on Facebook, Twitter and ChimeIn during the program.

Utilizing online spaces to disseminate information and bring attention to voices that have been traditionally excluded from the dialogue is in the right direction towards collaboration and community building. The Creating Change conference demonstrated an effective way of doing just that.

--Dunja Antunovic