Theo North

The NYT today has a front page story on high school cheerleaders being forced by overzealous parents and educational bureaucrats to divide their time equally between cheering for boys’ and girls’ sports teams. “‘It feels funny when we do it,’ said Amanda Cummings, 15, the cheerleading co-captain, who forgot the name of a female basketball player mid-cheer last month.”

Even the children know that something is wrong with this scenario:

Several cheerleaders [in Johnson City] recalled a game two years ago, long before the complaint, when the squad decided at the last minute to cheer for the girls’ team because a boys’ game was canceled.

The cheers drowned out directions from the girls’ coach, frustrated the players, and created so much tension that the cheerleaders left before halftime.

“They asked, ‘Why are you here?’ ” recalled Joquina Spence, 18, a senior cheerleader. “We told them, ‘We’re here to support you,’ and it was a problem because they kept yelling at us.”

…

“We joined sports to have fun, but they’re basically taking the fun away and giving us more work,” [Katelin Maxson, the captain of the cheerleading squad] said. “The interest is down so much, and it’s going to keep dropping, until there’s no cheerleading anymore.”

There you have it. The feminists are leveraging Title IX to advance their anti-American anti-cheerleader agenda. Need further proof? From the horse’s mouth:

Ms. Pudish said that as many as 60 cheerleaders, along with their friends and parents, would attend the boys’ games, injecting a level of excitement and spirit that was missing from the girls’ contests.

“It sends the wrong message that girls are second-class athletes and don’t deserve the school spirit, that they’re just little girls playing silly games and the real athletes are the boys,” said Ms. Pudish, an accountant who works for the federal government.

Maybe Ms. Pudish is correct, maybe the boys are athletes and the girls are playing silly little games. That may not be such a bad message to send to our children, but the message Ms. Pudish wants to foist upon our society is that high school is not a time for fun and flirting but rather a time for the federal government to tell you what you can and cannot do. The issue may be cheerleaders but what we’re doing is coddling our children into accepting a nanny state:

And for the first time this fall at Westborough High school in the Boston suburbs, cheerleaders were provided for all the varsity athletic teams, including girls’ field hockey and volleyball. “In our minds, there’s no major or minor sports,” said Brian Callaghan, Westborough’s athletic director.

Cheerleaders at a girls’ field hockey or volleyball match? What about the debate and forensics teams? Don’t they deserve cheerleaders? Those are varsity sports, too. We’d better coddle the nerds while we coddle all the other athletes. It’s only fair after all, and high school is all about teaching children to expect, nay, demand fairness from the world. After all, it’s what they’re entitled to. (NYT)

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 3.43 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.