Roughly 154,000 U.S. high schoolers were on their schools’ cheer teams in 2024—scores of them at Salinas High School. Nationally, and at SHS, 98% of today’s cheerleaders are girls. That was not always the case—in fact, cheer has long been a fascinating laboratory for those who study the shifting meanings and dynamics of gender relations in American high schools.
In the early twentieth century, all of Salinas High’s “yell leaders” were boys. In the years surrounding World War II, mixed-gender yell leader squads appeared. By the early 1960s the squads were exclusively made up of girls, now dubbed “cheerleaders.” For several decades in the mid-twentieth century, cheerleaders were perhaps the highest-status girls on campus, and they were at the center of an expanding sports spirit complex—including pom pon girls, marching bands, drill teams, and rooters clubs—that generated dramatic pageantry in support of boys’ football and basketball.
Following the 1972 passage of Title IX, many people questioned the future of cheer. If girls could now be center stage as athletes, why would they accept a supporting role on the sidelines? In response, cheer reconstituted itself as a hybrid activity: still drumming up spirit for school sporting events, but now also an athletic, competitive activity.