Quick answer: cheerleading began at American college football games in the late 1800s as organised crowd-leading - first at Princeton, then famously at the University of Minnesota, where student Johnny Campbell led the crowd in 1898. It was an all-male activity at first, became predominantly female from the 1940s, and later split into sideline cheer and the separate competitive sport now governed internationally by the International Cheer Union.
The Earliest Cheerleading
Organised crowd-leading grew out of American college football in the late 19th century. Princeton students were already using organised group yells in the 1870s and 1880s, and Princeton graduate Thomas Peebles is credited with bringing the idea to the University of Minnesota in the 1880s. There, in November 1898, student Johnny Campbell stood in front of the crowd at a football game against Northwestern and led a chant - the moment usually treated as the birth of cheerleading. In its earliest decades this "yell leading" was performed almost entirely by men - see Who Invented Cheerleading? and Were the First Cheerleaders Men?.
Women Join Cheerleading
The University of Minnesota first allowed women to cheer in 1923. Women's participation grew through the following decades and accelerated in the 1940s, when many male students were away during the Second World War. By the second half of the century, cheerleading in the United States was performed predominantly by women, particularly in schools. See When Did Women Start Cheerleading?.
The Rise of Organised Training and Camps
In 1948 Lawrence "Herkie" Herkimer, a former Southern Methodist University cheerleader, founded the National Cheerleaders Association (NCA), and its first summer clinic, held at Sam Houston State in Texas in 1949, drew 52 girls and one boy. Camps like these standardised jumps, motions and technique across American schools - Herkimer's own jump is still called the herkie. The vinyl pom-pom, credited to Fred Gastoff in the 1960s, became part of cheer's visual identity in the same era.
From Sideline Support to Competitive Sport
In 1974 Jeff Webb, who had worked for Herkimer, founded the Universal Cheerleaders Association (UCA), which grew into Varsity Spirit. Televised competitions followed: a collegiate cheerleading championship was broadcast on CBS in 1978, and ESPN began broadcasting UCA's championships in the early 1980s. From then on, cheerleading increasingly split into two traditions: sideline cheer, which continues the original supporting role, and competitive cheer, where the routine itself is the event being judged. See How Did Competitive Cheer Develop?.
The Growth of All Star Cheer
From the 1980s, private All Star gyms - whose teams exist purely to train and compete, unconnected to any school - drove the growth of competitive cheer. In December 2003, the major US event producers founded the U.S. All Star Federation (USASF) to set common rules and levels, and the first Cheerleading Worlds followed in April 2004. See History of All Star Cheer.
A Global, Governed Sport
The International Cheer Union (ICU) was founded in 2004 to bring national federations together. The International Olympic Committee granted it provisional recognition in December 2016 and full recognition in July 2021. See History of the International Cheer Union and Cheerleading and Olympic Recognition.
Timeline at a Glance
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1870s–1880s | Organised yells at Princeton; Thomas Peebles takes the idea to Minnesota |
| 1898 | Johnny Campbell leads the crowd at a University of Minnesota football game |
| 1923 | University of Minnesota first allows women to cheer |
| 1940s | Women become the majority as male students serve in the Second World War |
| 1948 | Lawrence Herkimer founds the National Cheerleaders Association |
| 1960s | Vinyl pom-poms, credited to Fred Gastoff, replace paper ones |
| 1974 | Jeff Webb founds the Universal Cheerleaders Association (later Varsity) |
| 1978 | A collegiate cheerleading championship is broadcast on CBS |
| 2003 | The U.S. All Star Federation is founded |
| 2004 | First Cheerleading Worlds; International Cheer Union founded |
| 2016 | IOC grants the ICU provisional recognition |
| 2021 | IOC grants the ICU full recognition |
A Note on Dates
Some early details - the exact date of Campbell's game, or when Princeton's first organised cheer was shouted - vary slightly between sources. Where sources disagree, we give the most widely cited version and avoid false precision.
Sources: Cheerleading (Wikipedia); History of Cheerleading (USA Cheer); Being a Cheerleader - History of Cheerleading (Varsity); About the ICU (International Cheer Union)