What Is a Bid in Cheerleading?

Quick answer: a bid is an earned invitation or qualifying spot awarded to a top-placing team at a competition, giving them entry into a larger, often more prestigious, end-of-season championship event.

What the Term Means

Rather than every team being automatically eligible for the biggest end-of-season events, many competition providers award a limited number of bids at qualifying competitions throughout the season. Winning a bid effectively means "earning your spot" at a bigger event.

How It Affects a Team's Season

Bids are often a major goal for a team's season, shaping which competitions they attend and how the routine is developed and refined over time, aiming to peak in time for bid-awarding events.

How Bids Are Awarded

Bids are typically awarded based on placement or score within a level and division at a specific qualifying competition - for example, the top-scoring team in a division at a given event might receive a bid. Exact criteria vary between competition providers.

Types of Bid

For the biggest end-of-season events - The Cheerleading Worlds and The Summit - bids come in several types:

• Paid bid - an invitation that also covers part of the team's costs of attending, such as travel, accommodation or entry fees. These usually go to the highest-scoring teams at major qualifiers.
• Partial-paid bid - an invitation that covers a smaller share of the costs.
• At-large bid - an invitation where the team pays its own costs.
• Wild card bid (The Summit) - an invitation to compete in a preliminary round, with the team paying its own costs.

At The Summit, the bid type also decides where a team starts: in recent seasons wild card teams have begun in the preliminary round, while at-large, partial-paid and paid bid teams have gone straight to the semi-finals.

Scoring-System Differences

Which competitions offer bids, how many are awarded, and to which championship events, varies significantly between competition providers and governing bodies, and changes between seasons.

Related Terms

See Qualifier for the related concept of a qualifying competition, and What Is All Star Cheer? for context on the wider competitive season.