When I Was.....

Usually when I start a sentence with When I was a kid, or when I was in school there is a good knowledge of where the conversation is going. My wife will tell me to turn the Grandpa down.

Today we went to a high school basketball game which for us is a very common event in the winter. One of the things that I notice is that cheering has totally changed. For many of the smaller schools cheerleading is no longer even something they sponsor. A friend of mine coaches at a small school on the coast and his school is one of the many that no longer even have cheerleaders.

For those schools that do have cheering the purpose of the sport has changed. Here we go, when I was a kid cheerleaders cheered for the teams. They had organized cheers, they sometimes led the crowd in cheering. During breaks in the game they would go out on the floor and perform a cheer at half court.

Somehow it all changed. For the most part cheerleaders now stand on the sideline and do very few cheers. There are no cheers for Defense, or to Sink it Johnny when a free throw is about to be made. There are no cheers on the court. I asked someone about this they said they could not do the cheers on the hard floor. I did not mean the gymnstic routines they do now, I meant the give me a B.

It just seems like the purpose has changed. Now should the girls have events that are more athletic and participatory than they are secondary in nature and cheering for others. Is there something overtly sexist about girls standing on the sidelines and cheering for boys. Perhaps.

I just know that I, like you, can easily recall the cheers at the games when I was a kid. Two, Four, Six, Eight, R E B O U N D S Rebound and many others.

I think another generation will not have that memory. Good, Bad, I do not know. I do know I do not like it.