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July was a little slow, but here are the public articles we found. There were also a couple article referring to a lawsuit or lawsuits filed against Varsity, USASF, USA Cheer, Jeff Webb and related entities that were behind paywalls.
Welcome to the 2nd half of 2020. In late June the USASF announced the standings in their Worlds Divisions Points Championship and the 2020 Scholarship Recipients. Here’s some of the other news from June.
Welcome to June. Both USASF & IASF have publicly posted their Divisions and Rules for the upcoming season, something USASF hasn’t done in a couple seasons.
Personal Development & Leadership Training coming to you Virtually!
Now is the time to invest in yourself! The IMPACT Leadership Workshop, designed for All Star Professionals like yourself, has been redesigned to be even more accessible and affordable!. Developed by the IMPACT Leadership team, you will be taken through a series of introspective lessons designed to provoke thought, deepen one’s sense self worth, and strengthen and empower your voice as a leader and role model.
Topics Include
Participants Receive
To register, log in to your Member Profile and look for the Upcoming Meetings section for a complete list of events for which you can register.
Share With Your Athletes!
The BOLT/MARCH Workshop is designed for USASF Cheer and Dance Member Athletes who are entering 9th through 12th grades. Developed and led by alumni of the USASF Mentoring Leaders program, BOLT/MARCH will set athletes on a path to success and is now more affordable and more accessible than ever before! Athletes will register directly from their Member Portal!
Athletes are: eligible to serve on the USASF Athlete Advisory Council, able to participate in the Healthy Kids Out of School project, receive advanced leadership training, and earn additional points for USASF Scholarships!
Coaches, encourage your athletes to continue their personal and leadership development by attending a VIRTUAL training. To share this information with your athletes, copy the link below and paste in your favorite platform (email, BAND, text, etc).
Since publishing Season Ending Update II a couple weeks ago the International Cheer Union (ICU) and IASF have cancelled their World Championships and Varsity cancelled the combined Summit event mentioned in that second update. To our knowledge there are no in person cheer or dance competitions remaining scheduled as part of the 2019-2020 season.
Welcome to May. We should be recovering from Worlds and starting the all level end of the year events, but instead most of us are still sitting at home. USASF cancelled Worlds 2020. IASF hasn’t announced a definitive plan, but is leaving the door open for having the event in conjunction with the ICU Championship in the fall. Varsity has announced A Summit will take place combining their end of the year events into this single event.
Since publishing our Season Ending Update, USASF has announced Worlds 2020 is cancelled, but IASF is continuing to considering having the International teams compete in the fall with the ICU Championship.
Varsity announced a “One of a Kind” Summit that will combine or replace The Summit, D2 Summit, Dance Summit, and The US Finals. The event will not require a bid and will be open to Worlds eligible teams.
Execution wins. I’d really like to stop writing with just that, but I feel like some sort of explanation is expected. On most of today’s scoring systems the difficulty portion is outlined enough that it’s hard to separate yourself from other teams on that side of the score sheet. In All Star Cheerleading if a team can’t get in the high range in every category that states specifically how to get in the high range, it becomes questionable if they are in the correct level. Of course there are exceptions, like teams put together to push kids or allow them to perform skills above the team average, but generally if you are trying to be competitive in a division you should be able to hit the high range in all difficulty categories.
With just about everyone that’s going to be competitive in a division being in the high range in difficulty it leaves execution as the deciding factor and the place you can separate your team. If you think of the teams and programs that consistently win does their difficulty or cleanliness come to mind. For me it’s cleanliness, aka execution.
How many teams can you think of that you would say the primary factor of their success over their competition is being more difficult? How about having better execution. What about being more creative? I can only think of 2 teams in which I think their creativity is what sets them apart from the other teams in their division and both of them rely on precise execution of their creative elements to ensure the skills are performed legally and are viewed by the crowd and judges the way they were intended to be. I can also only think of a couple teams that I feel like difficulty is the thing that consistently separates them from the competition and even within this group the most consistent ones also execute very well. Execution is the thing most of the highly successful teams I see use to set themselves apart from the competition.
The past week contained several updates to end of the season events.
Update:
What a month! Here’s some of the news that is not related to the season pausing.
About a week ago the season for many sports started falling apart. For me it started with several conference basketball tournaments announcing they’d be played without fans and picked up speed while watching an NBA game get postponed just before tipoff, after the players had warmed up. It spread quickly to other games and then to other sports and really hit home when March Madness, a personal favorite, was cancelled.
Between the Center for Disease Control recommending “cancelling all events of 50 or more people” for 8 weeks on March 15th and the White House suggesting everyone “avoid social gatherings of more than 10 people” for the next 15 days on March 16th, pretty much everything sports related I’ve seen was cancelled or postponed, except for the Iditarod sled dog race.
This responsibly, but unfortunately includes the scheduled end of the cheer and dance season. Since March 16th I haven’t seen any industry event scheduled before the end of May saying it would remain on it’s original date. This includes:
Updates:
At USASF and IASF, nothing is more important to us than the safety of the athletes, coaches, friends and families that attend our Worlds events. We are closely monitoring the potential impact the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), may have on upcoming Cheerleading and Dance Worlds events and will continue to make decisions based on recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control, local health officials and our event Partners. At this time, we have not received any indication that there is cause to cancel the upcoming Cheerleading and Dance Worlds events. We will notify you if circumstances change.
For what you should know, timely updates and more information on the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), please visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website.
February came and brought some major events including both NCA and UCA High School Nationals, Cheersport, and the beginning of NCA All Star. USA Cheer also announced the 2020 National Team representative for Hip Hop (University of Nevada Las Vegas), Jazz (Brigham Young University), and Pom (University of Tennessee).
January came and brought significant events like UCA & UDA College Nationals, Majors, NDA All-Star Nationals, and JAMfest Cheer Super Nationals.
Welcome to 2020. Here’s some of the news to close out 2019.