UK cheer is having a moment

On 11 August 2026, Sport England formally recognised SportCheer England as the National Governing Body for cheerleading in England.

That is the sentence a lot of people have been waiting roughly three decades to read. It follows the recognition of cheerleading as a sport by all the Home Nations' Sports Councils in March 2025, which came after years of joint work by SportCheer UK, the collective body of the Home Nations' cheerleading NGBs. Put the two together and you get something that has never been true before: cheerleading in England is now both a recognised sport and represented by a recognised national governing body.

Joey Gamper Cuthbert, Chair of SportCheer England, put it about as well as it can be put:

"It doesn't change everything overnight, but it gives cheerleading something incredibly important. It gives us a seat at the table, a stronger voice for our athletes and clubs, and the opportunity to build a world-class sporting system around a community that has already demonstrated extraordinary passion, resilience and success."

Karl Olson, President of the International Cheer Union, the IOC-recognised world governing body, called it a historic milestone for the sport, and said it was "a powerful testament to the extraordinary work of SportCheer England, its leadership, and the entire English cheer community."

The ICU itself received full recognition from the International Olympic Committee in July 2021. It has since submitted a bid for cheerleading to be included in the Brisbane 2032 Olympic programme.

Here is the part of the story that deserves more attention than it will get.

SportCheer England did the governance work that led to this recognition almost entirely with volunteers, and it received no core public funding for any of it. Years of building safeguarding structures, membership systems, coach development pathways and athlete welfare provision, to the standard a modern NGB is held to, delivered by people doing it in their own time. In 2025 the organisation also gave evidence to Parliament's Game On inquiry.

Read that again, because it explains almost everything about how UK cheer actually operates.

It explains why a gym in the Midlands runs a bag pack at a supermarket to get a team to Orlando. It explains why the mats are old. It explains why coaching qualifications get paid for out of somebody's own wages, why the competition floor is in a leisure centre with a low ceiling, and why the parents' WhatsApp group has a spreadsheet in it.

The growth happened without institutional money, which means it happened because people wanted it enough to pay for it themselves. Sports that grow that way tend to have very good foundations and very tired volunteers.

Around 90,000 people take part in cheerleading across the UK every week. Participation is roughly 98 per cent female, which makes it one of the most significant girls' and young women's sports in the country, and it is now established in schools, colleges and universities. It has a particular value that the wider sports sector has been slow to notice: it holds on to girls through exactly the ages when participation in most traditional sports falls off a cliff.

The competitive record is not a consolation prize either. Team England has won multiple World Championship titles across a range of divisions at the ICU World Cheerleading Championships over the past nine years. English clubs became the first outside the USA and Canada to win multiple gold medals at the IASF Club World Championships. Cheerleading featured at The World Games for the first time in 2025, with England athletes selected to represent Team GB.

England has also led internationally on Adaptive Abilities cheerleading. English coaches and organisations helped develop the ICU's Adaptive divisions, and Team England showcased the world's first Adaptive team as the division was being built. That is not a footnote. It is one of the few places in British sport where the inclusive version of the sport was designed at the same time as the elite version rather than bolted on a decade later.

The stereotype still has not caught up with the reality. Cheer is a tumbling, stunting, conditioning sport with a genuine injury profile and a serious training load. Athletes are in the gym multiple evenings a week doing strength work, drilling the same fifteen seconds of a routine until it stops being a decision and starts being a reflex. Routines are judged against international scoring systems on difficulty, execution, creativity and teamwork, and success depends less on any individual than on complete synchronisation across a squad.

It is also, quietly, one of the more welcoming places in British youth sport. Squads are mixed age and often mixed sex. They are mixed ability in a way that is designed in rather than tolerated. There are roles in a routine for the flyer who weighs forty kilos and for the base who deadlifts more than her dad, and both of them are load bearing in the literal sense. Plenty of athletes arrive having been told by another sport that they were the wrong shape for it.

We build activewear for this sport, so take this with the appropriate pinch of salt. But there is a reason we started.

When a sport is under-resourced, the kit is usually the last thing anyone gets round to. You end up in whatever the gym could get printed cheaply, in sizes designed for a different body, in fabric that was not made to be trained in for four hours. The gear that is properly made for cheer has historically been American, priced in dollars, and shipped with a customs charge on the end of it.

We wanted to make something designed here, sized for the range of bodies that are actually on a mat, and finished to a standard that felt like the sport deserved it. That is why our pieces run from YXS to A3XL rather than stopping where it gets commercially inconvenient. It is why the rhinestones are hand set, which is slower and more expensive and, we think, obvious the moment you see one under competition lights.

If you want the practical version rather than the philosophy, our guide to choosing cheer shoes in the UK is more useful than this article, and the size guide will tell you more about fit than we can here. The Signature Range is where most people start. You can see everything in the shop.

Recognition is a starting line, not a finishing one. SportCheer England now works with Sport England, the other Home Nations' NGBs, the ICU and ICU Europe on the next phase, and the test of whether this was a genuine turning point is whether the dull, specific things follow.

Funding that reaches gyms rather than stopping at a national office. Coaching pathways that do not depend on one person in each region doing four jobs. Facilities with ceilings high enough to throw in. Safeguarding and medical provision that is standard rather than exceptional. Schools treating cheer as a sport on the timetable instead of a club that uses the hall on a Thursday.

None of that is glamorous and all of it is the actual work.

In the meantime the sport carries on being carried by coaches who are underpaid, parents who are undersleeping, and athletes who would do it anyway. That has been true for years. The difference is that now, finally, there is someone in the room when the decisions get made.

Good. Let them watch.