A Man in Minnesota


Cheerleading is a fun sport that uses organized routines that consists of tumbling, dances, jumps, cheers and stunts. The purpose of this sport is to encourage both at school and all athletic activities. Cheerleaders always have a positive attitude and they are to represent where they came from at the highest level both personality and professionally. Today, cheerleading is an important leadership on practically every high school and college in America. Cheerleading is mostly a women’s sport and there is a high population of females that participate in this sport as we speak.
Do you ever wonder who created cheerleading? Well if you do, cheerleading all started by a man in Minnesota that couldn’t stand sitting in the bleachers, but had to stand in front of them. Cheerleading as we know today was initiated in 1898 by a man named Johnny Campbell. Within in the last twenty years, cheerleading was gradually developed into a very complex capacity.
Johnny Campbell was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota. In 1899 Johnny Campbell and a couple of his friends, organized cheers, fight songs, and they had raised their school pride. And that was the first cheerleading squad. Johnny Campbell was the first cheerleader and they say that he started yelling with a megaphone “Rah, Rah, Rah! Ski-U-Mah! Hoo-Rah! Varsity! Minn-e-so-tah!” After that people started calling him a yell leader.
It all started one day at a football game when the University of Minnesota’s football team was losing continuously and they had no school spirit. Johnny Campbell couldn’t stand to see that and brought back the school pride. Since then Johnny and his friends were the yell leaders of their school and people loved how they were having a positive attitude and that they showed pride in their school. Later in the 1920’s, gymnastics and other athletic motions were incorporated by routines by the Minnesota’s cheerleaders. In 1923 at the University of Minnesota, female students were allowed to cheer. And at this time, cheerleading transformed from a very high male population activity to a very high female population activity.
As time was passing cheerleading grew more and more. More female students enjoyed it and other schools liked the way they had school spirit. Once they saw, they started a cheerleading squad. It was a considerable success. In 1973 cheerleader’s started cheering for a women’s sport. And in 1980, all star squads started to form everywhere. People around the whole world started cheering. Even in Great Britain, the students were cheering their favorite athletes on at sporting events.
Johnny Campbell really did a great and phenomenal thing for the world. It only takes one person to get up and shout for the whole entire world to scream, have positive attitudes, and be a leader. In the world today, cheerleading is still a big sport and probably will be lasting forever. And like I said before, all of this happened just because of one little man in Minnesota. The world’s first cheerleader: Johnny Campbell.