The History of Cheerleading

The Stephanie Hess The lights are dim, there is only a minute left in the game. The team is exhausted, the fans are on the edge of their seats, but there is still hope. The team’s motivation, the sideline cheerleaders, are chanting their hearts out for their team to win. They are a dedicated group of young women who give all to their sport of cheerleading, a sport that traditionally supports players of other sports. Cheerleading, however, which is now considered a mostly female activity, was actually begun by men. In 1869, at a Princeton vs. Rutgers football game, males started something called a ‘pep club’ were they made unified chants and yells. Then in 1884 Thomas Peebles, who started off as a Princeton student moved to Minneapolis and introduced the ‘pep club’ to them. One of the University of Minnesota’s great ‘team yells’ was SKI-YOU-MAH made by two rugby players John W. Adams and Win Sargent. This chant has a very significant meaning to it, ‘Ski’ is a Native American Sioux battle cry meaning victory and ‘U-Mah’ represents the University of Minnesota. As you have realized by now no women were involved with early cheerleading. It wasn’t until 1923 that women were allowed to join cheerleading. After that it became a co-ed sport, where everyone contributed ideas to the sport not just males. In the twentieth century one big contributor to cheerleading was Lawrence “Herkie” Herkimer. By 1948 he had done a lot for the cheerleading community. Just some of his great achievements were developing the “Herkie” jump, the spirit stick, and the “pom-pon”. To this day cheerleaders still use all three of these items. Also, he introduced cheerleading training camps in Texas that same year. When we fast forward about 20 years the cheerleading routine was born. Which means cheerleaders started to incorporate music with their routines instead of just cheers, chants, and