Quick answer: there's no single inventor of cheerleading as we know it today - it grew gradually out of organised college crowd-leading in the United States. The most commonly cited "first cheerleader" is Johnny Campbell, a University of Minnesota student who led the crowd in an organised chant at a football game against Northwestern in November 1898.
Why There's No Single Inventor
Cheerleading didn't appear as one invented activity - it evolved from informal crowd noise into organised "yell leading" over the final decades of the 19th century, as American colleges began appointing students specifically to direct and coordinate crowd chants at football games. That gradual, collective evolution makes a single "inventor" difficult to identify with certainty.
The Most Commonly Cited Origin Point
Organised group yells were already a feature of Princeton football in the 1870s and 1880s, and Princeton graduate Thomas Peebles is credited with taking the idea to the University of Minnesota in the 1880s. There, in November 1898, with the team struggling against Northwestern, student Johnny Campbell stood up in front of the crowd and led them in the chant "Rah, Rah, Rah! Ski-U-Mah!" Minnesota won, Campbell went on to organise a group of "yell leaders", and the moment is generally treated as the first time an individual took on the role we'd now recognise as a cheerleader.
Why This Story Should Be Treated Carefully
Early organisational history like this is often preserved through institutional retellings and oral tradition rather than extensive contemporary documentation, so precise dates, names and "firsts" can vary between sources. Treat the Johnny Campbell story as the most widely repeated origin point, not an uncontested, precisely documented fact.
What's More Certain
What's better supported across sources is the broader pattern: organised crowd leading at American college sports developed through the late 1800s, was overwhelmingly performed by men in its earliest decades, and gradually formalised into the structured activity that would eventually become both sideline cheer and, much later, competitive cheer. See Were the First Cheerleaders Men? for more on this.
A Note on Dates
Some early details vary slightly between sources. Where sources disagree, we give the most widely cited version and avoid false precision - the sources we used are listed below.
Sources: Cheerleading (Wikipedia); History of Cheerleading (USA Cheer); Being a Cheerleader - History of Cheerleading (Varsity)