Cheerleading
sports activity in which the participants cheer for their team as a form of encouragement

Cheerleading is an activity in which the participants (called cheerleaders) cheer for their team as a form of encouragement. It can range from chanting slogans to intense physical activity. It can be performed to motivate sports teams, to entertain the audience, or for competition. Cheerleading routines typically range anywhere from one to three minutes, and contain components of tumbling, dance, jumps, cheers, and stunting. Cheerleading originated in the United States, where it has become a tradition. It is less prevalent in the rest of the world, except via its association with American sports or organized cheerleading contests.
Modern cheerleading is very closely associated with American football and basketball. Sports such as association football (soccer), ice hockey, volleyball, baseball, and wrestling will sometimes sponsor cheerleading squads. The ICC Twenty20 Cricket World Cup in South Africa in 2007 was the first international cricket event to have cheerleaders. Some Brazilian association football (soccer) teams that play in the Brazilian Serie A have cheerleading squads, such as Bahia, Fortaleza and Botafogo.
The public source identifies “Cheerleading” as sports activity in which the participants cheer for their team as a form of encouragement. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cheerleading, sports and activity.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q61391. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cheerleading” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.