The cheerleading establishment and its corporate captain have arrived at their most precarious, yet ambitious, juncture.
On the one hand, the competitive cheer business is besieged by snowballing legal claims, industry insurgencies and heightened media scrutiny, all of which are challenging Varsity Brands’ power over the market.
At the same time, cheerleading has made noticeable advances when it comes to Varsity’s aspirations to turn it into an Olympic and big-time intercollegiate sport, with the possibility of a major triumph for the latter coming sometime this month.
For all these reasons, industry stakeholders—and Varsity itself—have coalesced around the idea that a credible, independent governing body is needed to guide cheerleading out of its scandal-ridden and litigious present into a stable and prosperous future.
Enter the USA Federation for Sport Cheering (USA Cheer), one of a number of cheerleading organizations that Varsity, the multibillion-dollar Bain Capital holding company, helped launch over the last two decades. Long considered a small fry in this batch of Varsity-aligned entities, USA Cheer has taken on an increasingly outsized role in recent years.
The Texas-based nonprofit, which lives off a multimillion-dollar, interest-free loan from Varsity, has asserted itself as the best option to serve as a unifying governing body for all of cheer, both club and scholastic.
It’s a tall order for an organization that, 15 years after its creation, has yet to prove it can financially stand on its own two feet, let alone handle the litany of challenges facing the industry it purports to represent.
Among those challenges are 12 pending sex-abuse lawsuits, all filed within the last four months, that accuse Varsity, USA Cheer and another affiliated organization, the United States All-Star Federation (USASF), of colluding to create and cover up an allegedly predatory youth-sports culture.
This torrent of litigation closely followed three federal antitrust cases accusing Varsity of operating as an illegal monopoly that harmed cheerleading consumers, snuffed out healthy competition and endangered the lives of children.
THE TIES THAT BIND
The USASF has come under a harsh glare in light of the sex-abuse allegations. Formed by Varsity in 2003—four years before USA Cheer was born—USASF has become cheerleading’s most powerful “governing authority,” overseeing some 150,000 athletes and sanctioning over 800 all-star club events each year, culminating with the high-profile, ESPN-televised Cheerleading Worlds and Dance Worlds in April. In recent years, however, USASF has been plagued by doubts about whether its ties to Varsity inhibited its efforts to investigate misconduct complaints.
A lawsuit filed last week in California accuses a current USASF board member, Becky Herrera, the owner of the CheerForce gym in Simi Valley, of facilitating the alleged sexual abuse by a former coach, Shawn Miller, against the plaintiff, who is identified as “E.M.” (Neither Herrera nor Miller responded to email and LinkedIn messages requesting comment.)
“USA Cheer and the USASF are two very different organizations,” said Lauri Harris, who has served as USA Cheer’s executive director since 2017, after a quarter-century working for Varsity. Harris insists that, for starters, USA Cheer’s board has been “independent since its inception,” and that the organization has made moves to hasten its autonomy.
But as USA Cheer has taken center stage, some critics decry it as just another Varsity puppet, a USASF stand-in, similarly incapable of rooting out abuse and holding industry stakeholders accountable.
“I think it is up to them to prove they aren’t what they most likely are,” said David Owens, whose cheerleading competition company, Rockstar Championships, is a lead plaintiff in the antitrust case against Varsity and USA Cheer. “In my opinion, USA Cheer was not created for the greater good of our industry; it was created as a mechanism of control.”
Les Stella, the executive director of the upstart World Allstar Federation, which launched in July as an independent alternative to the USASF and USA Cheer, argues that no oversight organization can truly serve the needs of the sport without having an arm’s-length relationship from any for-profit company, but especially from Varsity.
“As a person I love Lauri—I have known her for 30 years,” Stella said. “She is actually a really good person. But it’s the same thing as with the USASF: A lot of people who are doing what they believe is the right thing for the kids, but the problem is it’s controlled by Varsity.”
Stella says he speaks from experience, having worked for decades as a Varsity employee, serving on the USASF’s rules committee, and later becoming executive director of its global sister organization, the International All-Star Federation (IASF). He recalled that during their first meeting to discuss the IASF, Varsity Founder Jeff Webb told him in no uncertain terms why the company had created the governing bodies: “It wasn’t because we wanted some governing body to f—ing tell us what to do. It was our strategy to take over all-star cheerleading, and it f—ng worked, too.”
Stella said Webb reiterated this point, in similarly colorful language, on several more occasions. (Through a spokesperson, Webb said he had “no recollection” of saying anything of the sort.)
Harris contends that Owens’ and Stella’s views on USA Cheer are those of the misinformed, if vocal, minority.
“You are always going to have those critics,” she said. “But we have, since the beginning, tried to stick to that mission to try to grow the sport of cheer, keep it safe and represent the U.S.”
AN OLYMPIAN TASK
In July 2021, the International Cheer Union (ICU), which is led by Webb, received full recognition from the International Olympic Committee after years of toiling to gain a toehold in the Olympic movement. The next key step in Webb’s long-held vision of putting cheer in the Summer Games would be an endorsement from the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee.
This has become one of the key charges of USA Cheer, for which Webb originally served as board president, and which the ICU has long anointed as its official American affiliate. Since 2019, USA Cheer has been endeavoring to become one of the USOPC’s “Recognized Sport Organizations,” a second-tier status for the governing bodies of non-Olympic sports.
In pursuit of this goal, USA Cheer became a 501(c)(3) federal charity in June 2021, after having operated as a 501(c)(6) since it began. Its new tax designation conveys a public interest purpose and carries greater annual reporting requirements.
In November, the World Allstar Federation also applied to become an officially recognized affiliate organization of Team USA, with Stella distinguishing it as “a true 501(c)(3).”
If nothing else, Stella’s group appears eager to serve as cheerleading’s Olympic ombudsman.
“I really don’t think that the USOPC knows about all this stuff [with USA Cheer],” he said. “They don’t know what is going on in cheerleading.”
The sport did not make the list of those under consideration for the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, setting up the 2032 Games in Brisbane as its earliest possible debut.
For USA Cheer, the more viable, near-term success is likely to come from the other prime mover of American amateur athletics: the NCAA.
PULLING A STUNT
At its annual convention in San Antonio next week, the NCAA is set to vote on whether to grant emerging sports status to Stunt—a Varsity-created, USA Cheer-promoted female competitive cheer spinoff—for all three collegiate divisions. Stunt’s anticipated approval, after previously facing rejection, would put it on par with USA Gymnastics’ rival sport, Acrobatics & Tumbling, which gained NCAA emerging sport status in 2020.
“We applaud any increase in opportunities for women to compete,” said Janell Cook, the executive director of National Collegiate Acrobatic & Tumbling Association. “However, with the overlap in skill sets, training mechanics, equipment, recruiting base and season of competition, it is unclear how [Stunt] would create new NCAA opportunities.”
Privately, other A&T backers gripe that Stunt’s real purpose is to claim for Varsity a profitable revenue stream from the collegiate market it had once spurned, for fear that the NCAA’s offseason regulations and training restrictions would impede its club-driven bottom line.
In 2010, Webb testified as an expert witness on behalf of five women’s volleyball players who filed a class-action, gender equity lawsuit against Quinnipiac University after the school decided to cut their sport in favor of carrying an acrobatic & tumbling (then called “competitive cheer”) squad. In his testimony, Webb told a federal court that cheerleading should not be considered a sport.
That same year, USA Cheer—with Webb serving as the president of its board—sent the NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics a proposal for Stunt to be included as an emerging sport, which coincided with USA Gymnastics’ pitch for Acrobatics & Tumbling. Noting their similarities, the NCAA committee later suggested that the two camps collaborate on advancing a single sport, which neither agreed to. Instead, they proceeded as rivals.
Webb continued to serve as president of USA Cheer until 2014, when he left that post to focus his attention on the ICU. Bill Seely, USA Cheer’s first executive director—and current president of Varsity Spirit—replaced Webb as board president, while the organization’s CEO spot went vacant for the next three years.
TAKING A FLYER
When Harris finally filled the CEO role in 2017, USA Cheer began rewriting its bylaws in anticipation of becoming a 501(c)(3).
Seely continued to preside over USA Cheer’s board until earlier this year, when he was replaced by Rhonda Blanford-Green, who had recently ended her post as commissioner of the Colorado High School Activities Association. Blanford-Green was not an entirely unfamiliar presence, having been one of USA Cheer’s founding board members.
“I have kind of seen and been a part of the origination, as well as the evolving,” she said in an interview with Sportico last month. “I think we are learning a lot about what the expectations are in the Olympic realm, as well as the NCAA realm, of an organization that is striving for that recognition and those opportunities.”
To address cheerleading’s problems and its strengths, Blanford-Green says, it has become increasingly important to consolidate the sport’s governance under a single authority.
“There wasn’t one particular group that could bring all those elements together and set expectations,” said Blanford-Green, “whether that expectation was for safety or a connected messaging out to anybody that would enter into this space. And I think that is the goal for USA Cheer, to try and bring together all these entities and have expectations at every level no matter where that would be. So it does take time.”
Though Blanford-Green is not a Varsity employee—like Seely is and Harris was—–she is also not completely removed from the company. As with other high school athletic associations around the country, Varsity has a corporate partnership agreement with the Colorado state activities association.
Seely, who declined to comment for this story, remains on USA Cheer’s board, serving as the representative of its scholastic cheer constituency, while Justin Carrier, a Varsity vice president, serves as the director representing “all-star cheer.” Carrier, who also declined to comment, currently serves as a USASF board member, as well.
David Owens argues that if it is to be taken seriously, USA Cheer needs, at a minimum, to sever all “first-level ties” to USASF.
“You don’t give them an ounce of power in an organization over children,” Owens said.
The USASF did not respond to a request for comment.
In late 2020, USA Cheer and the USASF announced that they would collaborate on a “unified athlete safety reporting process,” which included a list of restricted and ineligible cheer coaches that can be found on both organizations’ websites. Since its inception, the list has come under repeated criticism for failing to include convicted sex offenders, as well as a number of the defendants in the current sex abuse lawsuits. After the first of those suits were filed in September, Harris told Sportico that USA Cheer was “evaluating” its affiliation with USASF. When asked about it again last week, she said there were no updates.
FEELING OBLIGATED
According to USA Cheer’s most recently filed tax return, the Varsity loan had swelled to a $4.8 million balance by the end of 2021, roughly $20,000 higher than the previous fiscal year.
“I am not sure where people think things get started,” said Harris. “There is not just money out there being floated around to do good work. …Varsity did put money out there [for USA Cheer]. I know people are critical of that, but there was not a long line of people lining up.”
World Allstar Federation’s Stella, however, pushes back on that explanation: “How do they know that there was nobody willing to start a governing body? When Varsity is giving you millions of dollars, you never really ask anybody else.”
In 2021, USA Cheer reported a net loss of nearly $99,000 after taking in almost $1 million in revenue—indicating that it still has a long way to go to become financially independent.
As with other changes USA Cheer has sought to implement, Harris says its ability to remunerate Varsity was halted by the pandemic.
“Everything slowed down with COVID, honestly, and that is part of the reason there hasn’t been a payment down,” Harris said. “This is our first full year back.”
However, in a statement through a spokesperson, Varsity characterized the loan as “temporary financial assistance” and said that USA Cheer had begun repaying it.
“Varsity Spirit and USA Cheer are two separate, distinct, and financially independent organizations,” the statement said. “Any suggestion to the contrary would be false and misleading.”
Varsity has attempted to make a similar case in court.
In motions the company filed late last month in the sex-abuse lawsuits, Varsity argued that the plaintiffs had failed to legally establish that it was the “parent corporation” of either the USASF or USA Cheer. The filings cited language in an appeals court’s ruling from a separate lawsuit, which held that the founding or funding of an entity is alone insufficient in establishing the ownership or control of said entity.
“That Varsity Spirit representatives have held seats on the board of one or both organizations over time falls far short of providing a basis for treating USASF or USA Cheer as the legal alter ego of Varsity Spirit for purposes of these claims,” Varsity’s motion stated.
USA Cheer has yet to file its responses in the lawsuits. Its attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
For her part, Blanford-Green says the governing body is on the road to self-sustainability.
“The growth of USA Cheer membership, the different arms being placed under its umbrella, are allowing it to be sustainable without feeling obligated to any outside organization or capital group,” she said.