Advice for a First Year Cheer Coach Choose Your Battles Coaching high school cheerleaders is so rewarding. However there are times when it can be tough to coach teenage girls. Choose your battles.  Include The Team in Making Certain Decisions Ensure you have a clear distinction of coaches decisions and cheerleader's decisions. For example, as coaches we decide lineups, stunt groups, captains, etc. Cheerleaders help us to decide on practice clothing, how they wear their hair for certain games, themes for spirit week, etc. Establish that the coach has final say.  Create a structure so your team knows when they help make decisions and which decisions are made by coaches.  Over Communicate, but Keep It Concise Decide how you will communicate with your team and their parents/guardians. Parents appreciate knowing the schedule as soon as possible. At tryouts, try to give the cheerleaders and families as much information as possible. Then post the information.  If you are us...

We just got back from UCA Cheer Camp this week, we took our high school cheerleading team. Here is what I wish I would have done before I went to camp and during camp! 1. Made Pins In the all-star cheer world, decorated clothespins are super popular. From what I understand, the goal is to clip a clothespin onto a cheerleader from another team to wish them good luck. Our team LOVED getting pinned and wished they would have decorated pins to give to other teams. It was such a fun way to bond and connect with the other cheerleaders. 2. Made Thank Yous for Staff I wish we would have as a team created a Thank You basket or something to give to staff. Practicing gratitude creates a better experience. Staff would know we appreciate them and the work they do and our team would get a chance to reflect on being thankful to attend camp. 3. Practiced and prepared a cheer routine Separate from the material they learn, there are a couple of workshop classes where the team will come up with a cheer o...