“Cheer” – A Netflix Original. Review from a Cheerleading Coach

If you haven’t watched the most recent Netflix Original, Cheer, you’re missing out on an outstanding opportunity to learn about a sport that is rarely highlighted. I promised my own athletes that I would provide a full review of the show, the athletes, coaches and my overall impression (it’s worth points, you know).

Background

I was a cheerleading coach. I left the sport a few years ago and miss it very much. Every year I consider coming out of retirement; perhaps coaching a younger age group, judging again or teaching tumbling. This year was particularly grueling, on an emotional level, and it was completely due to this show.

In my coaching days, I began as a gymnastics coach and transitioned to cheerleading after participating on the University of Manitoba team. I coached with my closest friend, Carrie, and had other co-coaches, choreographers and team captains throughout the years.

Our teams

I was a collegiate cheerleading coach, opened an All-Star cheerleading gym with five teams, three business partners and thirteen staff; coached professional cheerleading for the CFL, became the Judging Director and then Vice President of our governing body. Needless to say, I was very involved with cheerleading. For the most part, I coached Level 5 and 6 teams and they were similar to Navarro in many ways. Carrie and I were roommates at the time and even though our lives have changed with marriage, kids and my obsession with yoga, we still remain close friends and have shared custody of our Puggle, Tonka.

Our choreographer for the collegiate team moved to Canada from Texas. He is a wonderful human being who worked with my team for years and is now a good friend of mine. His name is Jerry Mauldin and he owns a gym called Limelight. His former team was Trinity Valley; the competition to Navarro. We have had some amazing experiences together and he took a few of our collegiate athletes on to his All-Star team and took them to World Championships. He has invited me to work with his team on tumbling skills and we’ve invited him to work with our team on stunts, pyramids and maximizing the score sheet. He taught Carrie and I so much and our team just loved him.

We remember

When I was coaching, many of the events that were highlighted on Cheer occurred. In the second episode, we learn of the athlete Jerry’s tragic past. His mother passing away and the hardship he pushed through. I asked Carrie if she remembered when he lost his mother; she did. It shook the entire community and made its way all the way up to Canada. After all, any team that was competing at the World Championship level had to travel to Orlando for the competition. We felt the loss and deep admiration for Jerry.

I think we all love Jerry. Everyone everywhere. I also felt a connection with him when he planned to attend the University of Louisville. The head coach of that cheer program, James Speed, taught us an incredible amount about technique. He is a master and his program is outstanding. It has been outstanding for decades.

Cheer fame

My athletes began to idolize cheerleaders like Gabi Butler. They took photos with her, loved watching her compete and knew she was the best of the best. I idolized gymnasts when I was competing and although my perspective wasn’t quite the same as a coach, I can still remember hearing about these ‘famous’ athletes.

You cannot possibly know the intricacies of cheerleading until you’ve coached it. The Navarro athletes did not pop into Monica Aldama’s gym off of the street knowing how to do a double twisting x-out basket toss. They were trained very well and demonstrated a very high skill level. It’s difficult to explain the process of learning how to pile people on people. Believe me, it is not an easy process. It’s not like throwing a ball. People don’t ‘bounce’ back (pun intended).

Let’s break down the show, Cheer, and look at what went right, what went wrong and the pieces of the process that weren’t shown on the show.

The Docuseries

As a whole, the series was fantastic. They chose an exciting time to create the show because Navarro was preparing for their toughest competition. For this reason, the audience saw only what cheerleading looks like right before a high performance event. The difficulty, the exhaustion, the fight to be on the mat. All of that is real. Everyone wants to be on the mat and coaches are constantly making adjustments like Monica made throughout the series.

Carrie and I have rewritten our routine during warm-up because of unforeseen circumstances. More than once. In Mexico, we rewrote the entire routine on the beach. At times, we found a piece of grass outside a hotel and rewrote sections. It happens constantly and is very difficult. Saying that, the entire season is not quite that intense. Like any other sport, athletes are focused on keeping their minds and bodies together in order to perform as best they can.

The injury focus

There was quite a bit of criticism online about the injuries. So much so that Monica Aldama, the head coach of Navarro Cheer, had to defend her coaching style and the injuries that occurred. They had concussions, a dislocated elbow; rib issues and everyone appeared to be in pain. I want to touch on that element of the show.

If you have ever competed in or coached high performance sports such as gymnastics, hockey or football, you know that it is normal to have injuries at the peak of the season. The show illuminated the injuries, in my opinion, more than necessary and for the wow factor. Every practice is not a pyramid of broken bones. Before the biggest competition of the year, athletes will be pushing as hard as they can. I didn’t see any technical errors that led to injuries; high performance athletes get sore, tired and hurt. That is the reality of sport.

It’s called Sport

When I was competing in gymnastics at my highest level, I competed on broken bones. I tore tendons. I had surgery twice. I broke my ribs doing a bar routine because I had a cast on one leg and when I did a release skill, the cast hit the low bar and stopped my rotation. So I landed on said bar, ribs first.

The moral of this story is not that I landed on a bar ribs first. It is that I was training in a cast. My ankle was broken but I still had two working arms. More practice on bars. That is how every injury went; you train with the parts of your body that work or you do conditioning until you’re back in. When I was competing in the US, it was the norm. No one questioned it.

I’ve seen gymnasts break every bone you can think of. Not everyone gets injured all the time, however, illuminating the injuries of high performance cheerleading is no different than doing the same with any other sport during competitive season. All high performance sports come with injuries. I can promise you, even without seeing Navarro practice during off season that they are not getting injured in the manner that the show depicts.

Over-emphasizing injury

From that lens, I felt badly for Monica and her staff because it insinuated she let her athletes get injured or hadn’t prepared them properly. She did not do anything reckless. She coached smart cheerleading, had a normal amount of injuries given the competitive season and at no point did I see a single stunt that was performed dangerously. Falls happen. It’s the reality of sport; any sport. If you honed in on hockey injuries in the NHL right before playoff season, I believe you’d have a fairly accurate comparison. Cheerleading is not a death sentence. It’s a sport.

Let’s get deeper into the Cheer analysis.

The coach

Although I have not met her in person, I related to Monica Aldama the most. She has a similar coaching style to me; you could say it’s tough but fair. People used to joke that Carrie and I were the good cop- bad cop combination and much to my dismay, I was the bad cop (not dismayed at all – I worked that shit).

Based on my knowledge of cheer and of watching Monica coach, I will give you a bit of background on what wasn’t shown in the series. These are my assumptions; however, I would be willing to bet one standing tuck that they are accurate. One of the first things I noticed about her was how much she sat. She was often in a chair in front of the team, wearing heels and looking fabulous. If I were on a TV show, I would likely want to look slightly less shabby than I usually did for practice too.

Our practices

Typically at practice, I had a coffee in one hand and the music next to me. Carrie took videos of the routines just like Monica did and we analyzed every single frame after practice, in order to return the next day with a couple pages of corrections. I stopped the music if there was a mistake in the routine and politely told them to start again (it may have been more demanding than polite).

When I would turn the music off, there was no anger needed because the athletes were angry enough that they had to start again. Perhaps I would correct one element or offer some words of advice (like “work harder”). Sometimes, I just turned the music off and waited.

Going full out

The most frustrating part of this was when one of the athletes decided to leave out their jumps or do a timer. That means they didn’t go full out; they decided to not jump or flip or do their part. In the show, they did many full out routines before competing and they are tremendously difficult to train.

In cheerleading, every single person has to go full out because safety is dependent on committing to each stunt. I didn’t have to explain that to my team because when you’re catching flying people, you need to go full out. You cannot ‘kind of’ catch a flyer. You catch. You jump. You flip. End of story. Don’t feel like jumping? That’s ok, your team mates will see you in a dark alley after practice.

That is why Monica was sitting for the large majority of the series. She was watching, evaluating, re-writing and reassessing the routine against the score sheet. When you’re that close to competition, there is no more time for teaching. That brings me to my next point.

Training for Cheer

What you didn’t see is the hours upon hours of time that the Navarro coaching staff trained those athletes. I guarantee if you saw Monica or her assistant coaches during their off season, you would see a completely different perspective. She is likely a technical wizard with knowledge of biomechanics, physics and kinetics.

In addition, she likely spends time teaching the basics to her team and ensures they are catching, throwing, jumping and tumbling with proper technique. I would guess she runs camps, workshops and probably gets in there with her team much more than you saw on the show. NO ONE struts on to such a talented team and has the entire package of awesome that you saw on the show.

Technique

The stunts they performed came from training the body and mind; running progressions and drills and working directly with the athletes to understand how best they can learn. The reason the team has so much respect for Monica is likely because she is right in there with them. She is not above them or on a pedestal; she is a part of the soul of that team.

When you’re a coach of collegiate athletes, you become something more than their coach. When they sweat, you do too. When they work hard, you work harder. When they try something new, I bet Monica set up every single precaution she could to ensure that her athletes felt confident and trusted her guidance. That is what you didn’t see. You didn’t see what went into the moments that were televised. You didn’t really get to see her coaching and I know that she is damn good at it.

Cheer cop

As the bad cop in our coaching relationship, I definitely yelled the most, became angry the quickest and was the least receptive to ‘I will be late because (insert lame excuse)’.

I admit that I told one of my athletes I would chop off his pinky finger if he didn’t become the best stunter I had ever seen. He was a former football player that I attempted to get tumbling and it was like watching Shrek do a back tuck. Spotting him was an actual threat to my life (which I accepted because he is amazing). In the end, tumbling was not going to be his main contribution to the program.

This particular athlete worked incredibly hard. He became an outstanding stunter on the collegiate team, joined the CFL team and performed very difficult stunts on concrete as a giant TV truck nearly ran him over. Eventually he and his stunt partner made the Canadian National team.

They have attended World Championships five times. During their first trip to Worlds, I Skyped with both of them to see how they were feeling before competition. It was wonderful. I was so proud of them and knew that they had earned their spot on the National team. They were the first athletes in our province to be accepted on to the Canadian National team.

I almost felt a loss during that phone call because I knew they were beyond our program; it is what every coach wants and also grieves about. They went on to train with the best in Canada for many years. I told Shrek that his pinky was no longer in danger and he brought me back a cheer t-shirt that I still have. The pinky threat was, of course, a joke but it had a true layer of fear in it because we did have someone amputate a digit on our team. That’s a story for my next docuseries and don’t worry. He got it put back on.

The stunting

Stunting is the sequence where one male and one female perform a series of skills, typically with a spotter on the side. In the docuseries, they performed a hand-in-hand (handstand) and popped it to block (base holds flyer over head); a beautiful rewind series and the flyers were incredible. They were strong, aggressive and pulled their air positions even when the base underneath them struggled.

Do flyers fall out of stunts on a regular basis? Yes. Do bases bring down flyers? Yes. There was much frustration shown about stunts coming down and, as I touched on earlier, this is a critical part of a routine. The flyer HAS to stay up at all costs. From that perspective, Navarro stunted with proper technique and they rarely brought down a stunt. When a stunt came down in our practice, the music turned off. Dark alley threats were initiated.

Sections for Cheer success

We trained sections, as Navarro did, and made changes to improve the stunt sequence. If I believed a flyer wasn’t lifting enough or listening to correction, they went back to training drills and a new flyer went in. It is standard protocol. The person who hits stays in.

I share Monica’s sentiment in that if a stunt came down in competition, Carrie and I always felt responsible. We would ask ourselves why we didn’t pull it out or make it easier. We felt like we failed our team. It is the coaches’ responsibility to create and train a routine that will hit. Removing a flyer or a stunt often feels ‘mean’ in practice, however, the role of the coach is to put together a routine that is going to hit. And that’s what Navarro did.

The pyramid

A pyramid in cheerleading is incredibly exciting and challenging. Everyone has to hit and timing is the most important element. Timing is one of the first skills that is taught to new, little cheerleaders; tossing, lifting and catching at the same time and pace as their team mates. Nothing can be off count, no one can be lazy and all the flyers have to go as hard as they can.

I remember when our wonderful choreographer, Jerry, would teach us a new pyramid at the beginning of competition season. Not only could we not even attempt it, it seemed like a suicide mission to even consider working toward it. He always had faith that we would get it. Over the years, Carrie and I both developed a confidence that no matter how hard it seemed at the beginning of the season, a pyramid could be broken down into transitions, stunts and small elements. One piece at a time; it comes together.

Being perfect

When we trained our CFL team, we had no mats. In performance, they were on concrete and had no warm-up time. The football game started and they were on. We arranged their performance so that the easier stunts came first, in order to warm them up on field through the performance itself. By the time they ran through twenty or thirty stunt sequences in a quarter, they would be ready to throw a harder skill. Missing a stunt in a football game makes national television. It’s awful. They had to be perfect.

Many of our pyramids on the collegiate and the CFL team were similar to Navarros. We created pyramids that were 3-person high, bases held flyers while standing on other bases and we even through people from one part of a pyramid to another. We tossed them, free style, from the ground up to a pyramid, twisted down, reloaded and launched back up. We created a goal post and threw them over that. We threw them over TV cameras and people.

Basket Toss

This brings me to the basket toss injury. There was an elbow dislocation on the show. Did that happen on our team? Yes. One of our best flyers dislocated her elbow doing one of the same stunts Navarro did (hand-in-hand). And it was during a television promo. Perfect timing. The reason the flyer on Navarro didn’t get caught wasn’t due to lack of skill, poor technique or something missed during training. It was timing.

Timing is crucial. If a base (catcher) is supposed to be standing in a certain spot on the count ‘1, 2’ and the flyer gets tossed on ‘7, 8’ that leaves zero room for adjustment. On the 8 count, the flyer is gone. If the base is not there on 1, it’s over. If their previous stunt is slow or off time, they will be late for the next stunt and that’s how those types of injuries occur. That’s why timing is so important. Everyone knows what they need to do in every moment of the routine. And timing issues happen all the time. It can end badly, however, most often someone else can dive in and catch the flyer.

People piles are ok most of the time

Pyramids don’t always collapse in a dislocation vortex. They collapse into a people pile, however, the bases and flyers are usually so skilled at catching one another that they can collapse safety. We adopted a motto called ‘everyone catch everyone’. It worked really well. It didn’t matter if you were a flyer, tumbler, base or mascot. You will catch. If there is a person falling, you will catch them.

We actually tossed our mascot (in his costume) in a basket toss and he did a layout full twist. We had to train him in the costume, then with the head on (because he couldn’t see well with it on) and figure out what to do if the toss went backwards or sideways. No one, and I mean NO ONE, would get over seeing the CFL mascot slam on to the concrete. And it never happened.

Do it again

The pyramid collapses in the Navarro routine looked scary if you aren’t familiar with cheerleading. Most often, no one is injured and sometimes the moans or cries that you hear after a collapse aren’t injuries. They are defeat, exhaustion and a general ‘fuck let’s do this again’ type attitude. I believe Navarro trained their pyramid safely and many of the falls that were portrayed as injuries were tired athletes. Tired, sore and exhausted. Just like any other sport in peak competitive season. You have to work.

 Overall Impression

I have defined my overall impression into various categories and assigned a rating out of 10. A perfect overall impression is extremely hard to achieve.

Netflix docuseries – 8/10

Netflix can improve their overall impression by focusing on more positive elements of the sport. While the docuseries was highly entertaining, I took 2 points off of overall impression. These two points represent the overall image that Netflix gave the sport. It demonstrated the difficulty, dedication, challenges and achievements of the sport, however, the focus on injuries has caused an uprising of articles, memes and even a Saturday Night Live episode surrounding injured athletes. Netflix aims to entertain; that’s what TV shows do for viewers.

As with the news, a negative story is typically more popular than a positive one. All the fuzzy, good feelings don’t have as much of an impact as a wow factor, such as concussions and dislocations. By over-emphasizing this element of cheerleading, my impression of the show as a whole was lowered slightly.

The Athletes – 10/10

The athletes of Navarro Cheer owned it. They were excellent athletes, focused, determined and their skillset was impressive. I was particularly impressed with their tumbling. As someone who spent over two decades teaching tumbling, I can attest to the fact that running and standing tumbling on a non-sprung floor is hard as hell.

I have done a full twist on a basketball court numerous times. In no way could I ever rebound out of it for another full or even a back handspring. Just no. I was also extremely moved by the stories of each athlete. So much hardship had come into their lives and the team unity was an impressive network of support. I give full respect and recognition to the athletes of Navarro Cheer.

The Coaches – 9/10

If I were reading this article (as a coach), I would initially feel offended and defeated that my athletes received a higher overall impression than I did. I would then attempt to shift my defeat into pride because as a coach, your athletes’ successes give you more pride than your own. I believe the coaching staff at Navarro is outstanding; there is no other possibility. The program itself is incredible; from the tutoring to support in life to team work.

The reason the coaches lost 1 point in overall impression is because, based solely on the show, we didn’t really see the coaches do very much hands on coaching. This is not my overall impression of the coaches as coaches; it is my overall impression of them strictly on the show. There was a lot of sitting and discussion, however, I know those coaches are technical geniuses.

Nobody coaches a team of that calibre who isn’t on the mat with their athletes, correcting and encouraging; adjusting and playing. Yes, playing. Coaches play with their athletes and let them have free time. One scene did show this and it was one of my favourites. I think the coaches overall impression would have been as high as the athletes had the show demonstrated their technical abilities more clearly. I would rather see Monica teaching a stunt than getting her nails done. That’s not her fault; but this review is about the show and not her on a personal level. She does have lovely nails (for the record).

My recommendations

Thank you for reading this comprehensive review. I have included below my recommendations for the next season.

• Season 2 should be created. Get on that.
• Give the sport a more realistic chance. It’s not a bone-breaking death wish. Focus more on training, learning and perhaps showing the audience what goes into these tremendously difficult stunts. The athletes make them look easily. Show the viewers that they aren’t; that would be a true impression of the sport.
• This season was focused on the weeks prior to the team’s biggest competition. I think that’s very exciting! Perhaps there is space to film a bit more training in the off-season to give the audience an idea of what training for cheerleading looks like. Those guys didn’t just waltz off of the street and toss a girl over their head.
• Tryouts. Look at what tryouts are like for the athletes and the coaches. I can say with true honesty that every tryout I have run has been a medley of excitement and grief. No one likes cutting athletes and no one likes losing them, even if they graduate! The show depicted Monica as a mother figure for that team and she certainly is. How does she foster that trusting relationship? It begins at tryouts. It develops at camps and it grows with each practice. There is a love for your athletes that is like no other; every coach has felt this. Tryouts are the best worst time of the year.

Review Finale

Thank you Netflix, Navarro and all readers of this article. The show “Cheer” was a wonderfully emotional rollercoaster. I truly loved it.

You know what else I loved? My cheerleading team.

♥

Here is a video of them in Halifax at Cheer Expo – a company run by a successful, kind and skillful woman named Laura Marr.

This video is from a collegiate competition called the Husky Open. It was a really fun event and I look back at this team and have such incredible memories. Athletes went on to Cirque du Soliel, the National team, married (each other), had their own kids and opened a cheer gym that my daughter will soon be a part of.

Special thanks to the University of Manitoba Bison, Storm Cheer and the Blue Bomber Cheer Team. Love you all!