For a great many reasons, it may be a good idea to begin an active campaign to turn your team gymnasts into local heroes.  Many gymnastics teams lose team members to high school and even Jr. High School cheerleading programs.  Many gymnasts have friends who can't understand where and why they disappear everyday for hours on end and can't hang out.  Some gymnasts eventually wonder why they are working so hard everyday and getting so little reward in return for all that time and work.  Each of these is a reason to put a little reality into the picture and get your gymnasts the respect and attention they deserve.

Gymnasts Lost to Cheerleading
 Gymnastics teams traditionally have lost excellent team members and even future potential champions to regular cheerleading programs.  This is not because the gymnasts expect to learn more there.  It is not because they think they will learn new skills.  Let's face it, most gymnasts could go through the whole try outs on a beam and make the squad easily with their current skills and never need to learn any new tumbling.  Gymnasts can develop friendships in either a gym or a cheerleading program, so that is not the reason.

Peer Recognition
 The primary draw of cheerleading is that it gives the gymnast peer recognition on a regular basis.  Every week at the game the whole school sees them perform, if not at a high level, certainly extremely competently and in one way or another that gets them noticed.  Peer respect and recognition is one of the tenets of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  After basic survival needs are met, humans crave recognition.  Cheerleading gives gymnasts recognition to an extent that they are not currently getting in a regular team program.

Recognition is Often Sadly Lacking in Gymnatics
 While they may have the respect of their teammates on the gymnastics team, that pales in comparison to recognition throughout their whole school.  Even a gymnast's closest non-gym friends often have no clue of the level of work, commitment and skill level the gymnast has committed to.  Even national and international success sometimes does not receive much more coverage than the local softball league, where the most athletic accomplishment is not spilling your beer while you try to catch a flyball.

Recognition is a Primary Motivator 
 Gymnastics, in the long run, might seem to provide obviously more self-fulfillment in the hierarchy of needs, but self-actualization is the highest level and the lower levels must be met, before the higher levels come into play.  So if gymnasts are not getting sufficient recognition, they may opt out to a lower level program in order to first meet that need.  And, unfortunately, this is a choice they may ultimately regret making, even if the regret is some years down the road.

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