On Jan. 8, 2020, Netflix came out with its first series of the docuseries “Cheer,” which followed the lives of a few cheerleaders that go to Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas and their road to winning Daytona. The docuseries seemed to focus on a few main people including the coach, Monica Aldama, Jerry Harris who became popular for his mat talk, Gabi Butler who was already a big cheer star before even coming to Navarro, Lexi Brumback who was one of Navarro’s best female tumblers and Morgan Simianer who became popular for her top girl skills. 

To understand cheer, one must have a basic understanding of cheerleading, and I think the docuseries did a good job of explaining all of the elements that go into this sport. You first have the flyer who is a girl at the top of the stunts who pulls different body positions, the bases who have the responsibility of keeping the top girl up and the back spots who help the bases and top girls by pulling up on their ankles and making catches. The main goal of Navaro’s collegiate cheer is to cheer and perform at sport games such as football, basketball and to win a cheer competition at Daytona Beach in Florida.

Season 1 focuses on the fundamentals of cheerleading, and it also introduced us to some of the cheerleaders and their stories. What I really liked in the first season was that they showed that cheerleading isn’t just about being on the sidelines cheering on other sport teams; it’s instead a really physical and mental sport that takes a really high skill level to be able to do. You can see this physicality and competitiveness in the cheerleaders as they compete with each other to make mat for Daytona and to win the competition. It introduced “Cheer” as an overall good docuseries that sums up the challenges of cheerleading that many people didn’t even know about.

Season 2, which was released on Jan. 12, 2022, gave us a refresher of cheerleading and what happened in the first season. This time we were introduced to new characters, saw how COVID-19 affected the team and we also saw their biggest rival compete and have their own screen time. None of these turn of events really compared to Jerry Harris, someone highlighted in the first season of the show and an alumni of Waubonsie Valley High School who faced sexual and child pornography misconduct charges and will be sentenced June 28 of this year, Harris faces five to 50 years in prison. This scandal was a slap in the face to everyone in the cheer world including me who attended cheer camps where Harris was present. Even amid this scandal, the show still included Harris in the second season and even had an episode titled “Jerry.” 

Overall, this show gave a deeper understanding into the world of cheer and gave some insight to people who might’ve viewed the sport differently. This show was very slow at times, but it was really interesting to hear the cheerleaders stories and how most of them don’t come from the best background but cheer has brought all of them together. “Cheer” has a five season contract with Netflix, so I expect that there’ll be more high flying episodes to view in the near future.