Males needed to re-create cheerocracy

I love my job at The Chronicle because I get to travel. That’s the big perk.

I tolerate all the long hours I put in so I can go to other ACC venues, see how other schools embrace the world of NCAA athletics and observe how our school compares with the other institutions of our venerable conference.

From College Park, Md., to Miami, Fla., I have come upon only one, across-the-board, incontrovertible fact.

Our cheerleaders suck.

Okay, maybe suck isn’t the right word. Gosh darn it, our cheerleaders work just as hard as any varsity athlete and receive almost none of the perks.

But no matter how much time they dedicate to their squad, the Duke cheerleaders will never be able to compare with their ACC colleagues because they lack one thing: dudes.

Dude cheerleaders make all the difference. When they’re not yelling through antique megaphones and modeling multi-colored trousers, male cheerleaders are the foundation for the aerial stunts that can make cheerleading downright spectacular.

So why is the John Q. Dukey missing out on the opportunity to see a cheerleader thrown 20 feet into the air?

At this point in the conversation my “double standard” alarms started lighting up like a fireworks display.

Football players tackle head-first and can break their necks. Baseball players are struck in the head and risk suffering brain damage. Just last year Cornell lacrosse player George Boiardi was struck in the chest with a lacrosse ball and died.

How could Duke allow all these hazardous sports to continue, but deem stunting “too dangerous?”

Ward’s response to my indignation was less than satisfying.

“What I continue to hear is that cheerleading can support their team without pyramids,” she said.

I wasn’t quite satisfied. I started to look into just how dangerous stunting can be. A 1999 study at UNC-Chapel Hill discovered that cheerleading was the No. 1 cause of fatalities for female athletes from 1982 to 1997.

With my interest piqued, I went to the cheerleaders themselves to gauge their opinions. I figured that they would surely welcome the opportunity to lash out at The Man who was stifling their creativity.

I ambushed sophomore Christie DeMason and senior Christie Regula and received surprisingly mixed reactions.

“I’m not too up on it,” Regula said of stunting. “More schools are banning it. It’s becoming a bigger issue.”

So where do we go from here? Although I feel the student body as a whole would like to see the return of male cheerleaders, we are faced with an administration that is staunchly against stunting, a long history of injuries to cheerleaders and a squad that feels that they can perform perfectly well without it.

I propose a three-step program.

Step 1. Put out a casting call and find guys to wear the silly pants, jump up and down and yell into the giant megaphones. Finding volunteers shouldn’t be too hard, as this job description isn’t too far removed from that of the average Cameron Crazy.

We had male cheerleaders of this caliber as recently as 1997, when a quartet of ROTC members cheered at Duke football games.

Step 2. Teach the dudes to lift and hold a cheerleader up in the air, so she can shake her pom poms seven feet up, much to the delight of the Duke faithful. To me, this seems like a low risk maneuver—I think all of us have survived a seven-foot, feet-first fall at some point in our lives.

Step 3. Everything else. This is the step where you recruit guys to do all the crazy flips you see at a legitimate football school.

So my message to Mr. Alleva and Ms. Ward is this: give my plan a try. If Step 3 is too scary, you can stay at Step 2 forever, and I don’t think anyone would complain.