Cheerleading Trivia
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95 free Cheerleading trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
45 free Cheerleading trivia questions with answers. Cheer trivia for squads, coaches, cheer parents and anyone who has ever hit a herkie. This quiz covers the whole sport: the first cheerleader at Minnesota in 1898, why the activity started out all-male, the SMU cheerleader who invented a jump and patented the pom-pom, and how a private company came to run most of American competitive cheer. It also covers what you actually do on the mat: flyers, bases and spotters, the basket toss ban, the injury statistics that made cheer a safety story, the road to Olympic recognition, and the pop culture that carried it around the world, from the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and Bring It On to Netflix's Cheer and Navarro College. Questions run from easy to expert and every one is labelled by difficulty. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who is credited as the first cheerleader, leading a University of Minnesota crowd in 1898?
Johnny Campbell
Johnny Campbell jumped the fence onto the field during a game against Northwestern and led the student section in a chant; Minnesota won, and November 2 is still marked as cheerleading's birthday.
Q 02In 2010 a federal judge ruled competitive cheerleading too 'underdeveloped' to count as a sport under which law?
Title IX
Title IX. Quinnipiac University had dropped women's volleyball and tried to count a new competitive cheer squad toward its gender-equity numbers; the judge ordered the volleyball team kept.
Q 03Cheerleading stayed mostly male until which war pulled the men off the sidelines and women took their place?
World War II
World War II. Women had been joining squads since the 1920s, but once the draft emptied the sidelines they took over for good, and by the 1970s roughly 95 percent of cheerleaders were female.
Q 04On Glee, which actress played Sue Sylvester, the tracksuited coach of the Cheerios cheer squad?
Jane Lynch
Jane Lynch won a 2010 Emmy as Sue, whose Cheerios compete with the glee club for the school's limited funding, which is why she is forever at war with it.
Q 05'Save the cheerleader, save the world' was the promotional tagline of which 2006 TV drama?
Heroes
Heroes. The cheerleader was Claire Bennet, a high-school student who could heal from any injury, and NBC's whispered slogan caught on so widely that rival networks were soon parodying it.
Q 06In 2009 Wisconsin's Supreme Court threw out a dropped cheerleader's lawsuit by ruling that cheerleading is what?
A contact sport
A contact sport: a lower court had said no, since squads never touch an opposing team, but all seven justices held that tossing teammates in the air counts, so the teammate who dropped her couldn't be sued.
Q 07Lawrence Herkimer, who gave the herkie jump its name, also patented which cheerleading staple?
The pom-pom
The pom-pom he patented, filed in 1968 and granted in 1971, had crepe-paper strands fixed to a built-in handle, so it could be shaken hard without the strands tearing loose.
Q 08Which company, founded by Jeff Webb in 1974 as the Universal Cheerleaders Association, dominates cheer camps?
Varsity Spirit
Varsity Spirit made its money three ways at once, running the camps, hosting the competitions and selling the uniforms, a grip on the sport that later landed it in court.
Q 09Which competition format judges cheer squads on fight songs, sideline chants and band dances instead of acrobatics?
Game Day
Game Day was created to reward what squads do on a real sideline rather than on a competition mat, and many schools now field a separate Game Day team for it.
Q 10What name does cheerleading give to private club teams that exist only to compete, with no school to cheer for?
All-star
All-star gyms started out as a training ground for school squads, then became popular enough in their own right to get their own competitions and, by 2004, their own world championship.
Q 11Where is the annual Cheerleading Worlds competition held?
Disney World, Orlando
Disney World, Orlando has hosted the Worlds since 2004, when it was meant as a final for American club champions; the name alone then drew teams from abroad.
Q 12In a cheer stunt, what is the person on top called?
The flyer
The flyer is the one lifted or thrown: bases hold her from below while a back spot stands behind, there mainly to protect her head and neck if the stunt comes down.
Q 13Under rules adopted in 2006, cheer squads may perform their riskiest stunts at university basketball games only when?
At halftime and afterwards
Q 21The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders' reality show Making the Team ran for 16 seasons on which channel?
CMT
CMT ended the show in 2022 after 16 seasons of auditions and training camps, and two years later Netflix picked the squad up for a documentary series of its own.
Q 22Which future pop star and choreographer was discovered while performing as a Laker Girl?
Paula Abdul
Paula Abdul was spotted by the Jacksons at a Lakers game and asked to choreograph their 'Torture' video, which led to Janet Jackson's biggest videos and then a singing career of her own.
Q 23In Bring It On (2000), the Toros discover their routines were stolen from which rival team?
The East Compton Clovers
At halftime and afterwards, and only on mats: the limits came months after a Southern Illinois cheerleader fell 15 feet from a pyramid during a tournament game and cracked a vertebra in her neck.
Q 14Between 1982 and 2007, cheerleading accounted for roughly what share of catastrophic injuries in US high-school girls' sports?
About 65%
About 65%: of 103 fatal, disabling or serious injuries recorded among high-school girl athletes in those years, 67 happened in cheerleading, as stunts that lift or throw a cheerleader grew harder.
Q 15Greg Whiteley, director of Netflix's Cheer, had already made which docuseries about junior-college football?
Last Chance U
Last Chance U followed players at two-year colleges trying to earn a way back to big-time football; Whiteley then turned the same cameras on a Texas cheer squad and later on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
Q 16Quinton Peron and Napoleon Jinnies became the first male cheerleaders to perform at a Super Bowl in 2019, with which team?
Los Angeles Rams
The Los Angeles Rams had added the two classically trained dancers only the spring before, so the team's playoff run carried them to the sport's biggest stage in their first season.
Q 17Which team had the first recorded cheer squad in NFL history?
The Baltimore Colts
The Baltimore Colts' cheerleaders performed alongside the team's marching band, which refused to disband when the Colts left for Indianapolis in 1984 and kept playing until Baltimore had a team again.
Q 18The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are officially nicknamed what?
America's Sweethearts
America's Sweethearts became the title of Netflix's 2024 series on the squad, which follows one year's hopefuls from auditions and training camp through a full NFL season.
Q 19Which choreographer was hired in 1972 to audition and train an all-adult Cowboys Cheerleaders squad?
Texie Waterman
Texie Waterman, a Dallas dance teacher who had performed on Broadway, was brought in because the team wanted polished entertainers in place of the high-school students who had cheered until then.
Q 20The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders were first widely seen by a national audience at which game in 1976?
Super Bowl X
Super Bowl X was a 21-17 loss to the Steelers in Miami, but the telecast put the squad in front of millions of viewers and turned its cheerleaders into national celebrities.
The East Compton Clovers had never had the money to travel to nationals, so the Toros' previous captain could videotape their routines and win titles with them without anyone noticing.
Q 24Bring It On was the theatrical directing debut of which future Marvel filmmaker?
Peyton Reed
Peyton Reed followed Bring It On with a run of studio comedies, and in 2014 Marvel hired him to take over Ant-Man after its long-attached director, Edgar Wright, walked away.
Q 25The Broadway musical version of Bring It On had music by Tom Kitt and which other composer?
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Lin-Manuel Miranda co-wrote the score three years before Hamilton, and because the stunts were real the cast mixed Broadway actors with champion competitive cheerleaders.
Q 26Netflix's docuseries Cheer follows the squad of which Texas two-year school in Corsicana?
Navarro
Navarro College's coach Monica Aldama had built a run of 14 national titles in 20 years on one rule: keep going until you get it right, then keep going until you can't get it wrong.
Q 27Where is the NCA national championship that the Cheer squad chases each season held?
Daytona Beach, Florida
Daytona Beach, Florida stages the college finals at its oceanfront Bandshell, an open-air amphitheatre, so squads that drill in a gym all year perform their one routine outdoors beside the sea.
Q 28Which governing body, founded in 2004, won cheerleading full recognition from the International Olympic Committee in 2021?
International Cheer Union
The International Cheer Union began as a meeting of 13 national federations and first applied to the IOC in 2010; full recognition lets cheerleading bid for a place at a future Olympic Games.
Q 29Which Florida politician married Jeanette Dousdebes, a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader, in 1998?
Marco Rubio
Marco Rubio, who dreamed of playing in the NFL himself, has joked that he must tell his children the only parent who ever touched an NFL field was their mother.
Q 30Which actress played Torrance Shipman, the newly elected captain of the Toros, in Bring It On?
Kirsten Dunst
Kirsten Dunst made it between The Virgin Suicides and Spider-Man; the film opened at number one and spawned six sequels that kept the title but none of the original cast.