Oh, Captain, My Captain :'(

So as many of you know, I was a cheerleader for six years. Yet I was not a bitch, and I stayed a virgin, just to dispel any (valid) assumptions. But more on that another day. Today I would like to discuss one of the days that I completely validated a cheerleading stereotype.

It was my senior year, and I'd been voted co-captain by the rest of the squad. Yay! This meant I got to start cheers with Michelle, the captain. We didn't do the whole "Ready, okay!" thing; the captains began a cheer by stepping in front of the squad and doing a part of the cheer. At a pre-designated time, the cheerleaders would join in and the captains would re-join the line.

The thing was, our basketball team was terrible. I mean really, truly dreadful. We had some good players, but…a lot of bad ones. South Shore Christian School was very small, and while we did turn away cheerleaders who didn't make the cut so don't go getting any ideas, basically if you had a Y chromosome and could breathe, you could be on our basketball team.

This meant that plotting out which cheers to do when required good strategy. Most cheers are positive, you see. Rah rah sis boom bah, woo team, we're awesome we're awesome that's what we are! But um, our window of time for these cheers was very tiny, within a game. By the time halftime rolled around it became rather embarrassing, talking about how quick with our hands and fast! with! our! feet! our team was, but at least we had our awesome mound to distract the three people in the audience. And now I realize I should probably clarify that "mound" in this case means one of those things in the middle of the floor that's like a pyramid, but not a pyramid. You know?

So anyway, it was bad enough having to brag about our team at halftime; we had to make good and sure to really hoard away all of our "you can do it" cheers. So straight off the bat, all of the positive cheers were milked for all they were worth. Before the audience and opposing school realized we were lying through our pom-poms.

This game was no exception. The team had fallen behind pretty quickly, so we decided to do our "Beat oh beat" cheer. Perfect for this doomed-yet-we-can-still-pretend-there's-hope moment. We felt very triumphant about this clever choice.

The cheer went like this, and I will use Sunnydale in honor of "Buffy" as the opposing team's name:

Beat, oh beat!
Beat, oh beat!
Who ya gonna beat?
Sunnydale!
Who ya gonna beat?
Sunnydale!
Louder!
Sunnydale!
Louder!
Sunnydale!

And this was all very exciting for me, because the italicized lines were done by the captains, and the responses were done by the rest of the squad. This was my first time doing the cheer as a captain, and it was like going from the chorus to getting a solo! Or at least a duet. The rest of the cheer went like this, in unison:

I can't HEAR you!
WHAT?
WHAT?
WHAT?
WHAT?
What what what what what what what!

And let's just say that second section involved very exaggerated pantomime. Because it did.

And let's just say that we were, that day, playing a deaf school. Because we were.

Oopsy daisy.






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