On November 2, 1898, a group of six young men stood in front of the crowd gathered at the University of Minnesota to watch a football game and led them in a cheer. This marked the first organized cheerleading squad, and the beginning of a tradition that has grown into a sport all its own. And while the cheerleading we know today is a sport led and dominated by women, for many years from the outset women weren’t even allowed to participate.
The idea of organized cheers during sporting events was nothing new at the time. English soccer fans regularly sang songs from the stands to motivate the team on the field, and this tradition made its way to American colleges. Johnny Campbell, a medical student at the University of Minnesota fully embraced these songs, but took it a step further when he gathered together some of his friends, grabbed a megaphone, and stood out in front of the crowd to lead them in a chant he had come up with: “Rah, Rah, Rah! Ski-U-Mah! Hoo-Rah! Hoo-Rah!” and so on. Campbell’s cheers continued on for years as an informal addition to football games, before the practice was legitimized with the creation of the University of Minnesota’s “Yell-Squad” which would be manned by the first official cheerleading fraternity, Gamma Sigma.
Cheerleading spread around the country, becoming a respectable activity for young men to participate in if they weren’t competing on the field. Texas A&M started a squad, and it quickly spread to august institutions like Harvard, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt cheered for his team, and to West Point, where Dwight D. Eisenhower did the same. It wasn’t until 1923 that women first broke into the old boys club of cheerleading. These early female cheerleaders introduced the cheerleading standards of today: high-flying acrobatics, flips, twirls, and tumbling.
When America entered World War Two, women stepped to replace men in the workforce, taking on unprecedented roles in factories, businesses, and at home. They also took over cheerleading, as so many of the college men had gone to war. And, it would seem they did a good enough job to fully transform cheerleading into a predominantly female sport. Some men stuck around and continued to the development of the sport, with the innovative cheerleader Lawrence Herkimer introducing the spirit stick and the pom-pom in the late 1940’s. Today, cheerleading has evolved into a sport with its own national competitions, associations, and rivalries, and a long, surprisingly masculine, history.