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Cheerleading
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This article is about U.S. style Cheerleading. For Japanese style Cheerleading, see Ōendan.

Youth Cheerleaders during a football halftime show. Youth Cheer—high school ages and younger—make up the vast majority of cheerleaders and cheer teams.
Cheerleading is a sport[1] that uses organized routines that range from 1 minute to 3 minutes made from elements of tumbling, dance, jumps, cheers, and stunting to direct spectators of events to cheer on sports teams at games and matches and/or compete at cheerleading competitions. Cheerleading takes years of practice and the practices last just as long as football practices. Cheerleaders draw attention to the event they are cheering for and get the audience into the event. The athlete involved is called a cheerleader.
With an estimated 1.5 million participants in allstar cheerleading (not including the millions more in high school, college or little league participants) in the United States alone, cheerleading is, according to Newsweek's Arian Campo-Flores, "the most quintessential of American sports."[2] The growing presentation of the sport to a global audience has been led by the 1997 start of broadcasts of cheerleading competition by ESPN International and the worldwide release of the 2000 film Bring it On.
Due in part to this recent exposure, there are now an estimated 100,000 participants scattered around the rest of the world in countries including Australia, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Japan,[3] the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.