We are proud of you

Tonight I went to a high school basketball game. My alma mater which I am still unconditionally (and a little disturbingly) committed to was playing. I enjoy basketball and, with that said, I apparently enjoy high school too because at this very time in my life I am training to be a high school teacher. My aspirations besides that are to be a basketball coach. I've lived a life that is mildly ambitious about accomplishing realistic goals. I have no perception of living life to the fullest. The lack of my goals in life being prodigious is not what I care to discuss though. My greatest concern at this very time is the fact that the cheerleaders at this game --in spite of their peppiness and desire to look like women much older than they (which they may or may not have accomplished)-- had to lead some of the worst cheers/chants in the history of competitive sports. I didn't fully understand some of them and there was flawed logic in most of them.

Now, being active in sports and only acknowledging the cheerleaders when I gawked at them, I know not what makes a good cheer good, nor a bad cheer bad. There are people out there who do, however, I am not trained in the art. One cheer that stood out to me in particularly was one that insisted "the Devils can't be beat." Yes, my high school's mascot is the devil, no I do not think that the devil is the undisputed champion of competitive sports. I found this to be, quite frankly, idiotic. I deemed it this because the team had actually been beaten five times this season. Count them: one, two, three, four, FIVE!! Now I have no doubt that this is probably a quality cheer to start the season off with, or when you're the 2007 New England Patriots up to the point of the Super Bowl. I can accept that. I might even cheer along. But these seem the only exceptions. Definitely not when you're team has proven on five different occasions that they are, in fact, very beatable.

Thinking this though, took me back about a decade to when I was in the 7th grade. I played football like many 12 year old boys do and the team I was on proved in every game of the season that we were beatable. We didn't just prove it, we almost reveled in it. Now, let me come to defense for my teammates and I. We were not well coached and we were undersized, slow Caucasian boys that were a little late in puberty. Beating us was not a large task. Don't think I'm exaggerating this either. We didn't even score a touchdown until there were two games left in the season. But such as memories go, what I think about the most when I remember that Fall is not that we lost every game, or the fact that I was scared every time I touched the ball. No, what I remember are the cheerleaders. After every game we lost my teammates and I would walk, heads hanging down, back to the sidelines. And the only thing we had to walk back to were our cheerleaders chanting "We are proud of you, we said are proud of you." This always was, and always will be, insult to injury. Getting murdered in football in front of your peers and elders can be traumatizing to a middle school boy. But this traumatic experience becomes tenfold when there are schoolgirls trying to cheer you up over that defeat. They know not the humiliation. And at the time, even right now, I always find it hard to believe that a group of 12 year old girls actually took pride in my lackluster performance in a football game. They didn't know about the game, they probably didn't know what it took to win. But that is not the point. The point is that cheerleaders, as harmless as they might seem, can really devour a boy's confidence. Sure their's was a harmless attempt at cheering us up. But I didn't want to be cheered up, I wanted to win a game.

Nobody wants pity cheers. Nobody wants illogical cheers. It's time this was realized.