How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular
For decades, the sport has been shaped in large part by one company — and one man.
Published Oct. 22, 2024 Updated Nov. 15, 2024
Nikki Jennings started cheering when she was 4 years old. She was small and flexible and became a flyer, a human baton spinning and twisting through the air before being caught by teammates. Until sometimes she wasn’t: She got her first concussion in the third grade.
Jennings was a budding star, and at 13 she joined a competitive gym called Rockstar Cheer in Naples, Fla. She was the golden child of her coach, Carlos Realpe — even if he sometimes pushed her too hard. Like when he ran practices late into the evening on school nights. Or when Jennings pulled a hamstring and he threatened her position on the team unless she pounded ibuprofen and powered through the pain. Or when he screamed and threw shoes and water bottles. (Realpe denies throwing things; two other team members supported Jennings’s account.) Parents of other children complained about Realpe’s coaching style, but Jennings brushed it off.
Jennings’s family moved to Georgia, and after her new team there won the Cheerleading Worlds in 2019, she became a minor “cheerlebrity,” modeling uniforms and taking photos with little girls who waited in line to meet her. That visibility led to a scholarship to cheer at the University of Hawaii, where she clocked up to 50 hours a week in training, games, hair and makeup and late-night, punishing drills after making mistakes on the field. According to Jennings, her coach, Mike Keolaokalani Baker, insulted his athletes when the team performed poorly. Jennings had begun swimsuit modeling, and she told a friend at the time that Baker said her Instagram feed looked as if she was prepping for an OnlyFans career. (Baker denied making that comment. He said the team did not typically practice and perform more than 20 hours a week; another cheerleader supported Jennings’s memory.)
Her junior year, Jennings slammed into a teammate’s shoulder during a basket toss, snapping her head back and giving her yet another concussion — her seventh. Soon afterward, she got sick from an unrelated illness and became depressed. Baker sent her an email cutting her from the squad. She could have lost her scholarship, too, had the athletic director not intervened on her behalf.
Two years ago, at 21, Jennings retired from cheerleading with a chronic hip injury, occasional slurred speech and intermittent headaches that she called “stingers.” She resolved to seek treatment for a traumatic brain injury. It was only when she was out of cheer entirely that she realized her difficult career in the sport was more than just a random string of bad luck. Jennings’s experience — of injury, grueling hours and emotional abuse — is not an uncommon one in the vast world of American cheerleading. “Every day I make more and more pieces click,” she said.
Nationwide, just over a million children, mostly girls, participate in cheer each year (some estimates are even higher), more than the number who play softball or lacrosse. And almost every part of that world is dominated by a single company: Varsity Spirit. It’s hard to cheer at the youth, high school or collegiate level without putting money in the company’s pocket. Varsity operates summer camps where children learn to do stunts and perform; it hosts events where they compete; it sells pom-poms they shake and uniforms they wear on the sidelines of high school and college football games. Each year, Varsity ships 4.6 million pieces of apparel, from $80 leopard-print “Cheer Mom” fleeces to custom uniforms covered in Swarovski crystals.
Critics like Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project, claim that the cheer giant is a monopolist whose dominance in its area rivals that of Google in tech and has had negative impacts for participants and their families. Varsity, based in Memphis, generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, with gross profit margins at times topping 40 percent, making the company a cash cow for a series of private-equity owners. Parents have reported spending upward of $10,000 a year per child in competitive cheer, with Varsity controlling, by some estimates, more than 80 percent of that market.
Jeff Webb, the man who founded Varsity, has been called “John D. Rockefeller with glitter” and the “Dark Sith Lord” of cheer by some of his detractors. Webb, now in his 70s, pioneered the gravity-defying acrobatics of modern cheer. He paired his innovations with a desire for control over every facet of the sport, which he pursued over the course of more than four decades.
To maintain his influence, lawsuits have alleged, Webb lobbied against categorizing scholastic cheerleading as a sport at the high school and college levels. Had the N.C.A.A. recognized cheer, it might have protected Jennings in college, limiting her practice hours and ensuring that she got a hearing if her scholarship were threatened because of an injury. Instead, Varsity founded governing bodies whose representatives sometimes downplayed safety concerns in the media as flyers like Jennings returned to the mat again and again after serious concussions. Competitive cheer is shockingly dangerous: In the past 40 years, the number of catastrophic injuries sustained by cheerleaders is greater than those sustained by female athletes playing all other high school and college sports combined. For many years, those same governing bodies failed to comprehensively track and ban problematic coaches, who bounced from gym to gym. Sometimes they did more than yell or throw things: Cheer is now dealing with a sexual-abuse scandal with parallels to that of USA Gymnastics.
Varsity’s market power has made the cheer world a paranoid place. In my reporting for this story, dozens of people spoke about the company in conspiratorial tones better suited to a spy thriller. My sources were at least right that the company was paying attention. Not long after beginning my reporting for The Times, a managing director from Teneo — the high-powered public-relations firm whose clients have included Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund — contacted me. I soon found myself dealing with separate P.R. agencies representing two private-equity firms, Varsity and Jeff Webb himself, who invited me to interview him. “I don’t think I’ve done a great job marketing myself,” he told me. “I would rather let the deeds speak for themselves.”
Varsity had been hit with a raft of antitrust and personal-injury lawsuits, which provided an unprecedented glimpse into Varsity’s operations: Thousands of pages of documents and emails showed how Webb, a former cheerleader himself, built a company so powerful that its market position has not been meaningfully challenged by the many lawsuits and controversies. In July, KKR, one of the largest private-equity firms in the world, bought Varsity and its affiliate companies from Bain Capital for a reported $4.75 billion, a clear bet that Varsity’s control of cheerleading will survive the current scrutiny. Since the KKR sale, a sense of foreboding hangs over the world of cheer: Is there any scandal big enough to shake Varsity’s grip on American cheerleading?
Jeff Webb grew up in the halcyon splendor of postwar Middle America. His father was a cowboy who became an accountant at an oil company. Childhood was a modest three-bedroom home, Little League Baseball and riding his bike around the neighborhood in Dallas. It was a “Leave It to Beaver” upbringing appropriate for the visionary behind a sport so intertwined with American nostalgia.
As a high school senior, Webb joined the cheer team. Today the sport is so freighted with cultural significance for American girlhood that it can be hard to believe it was once a male-only activity. The first cheers, copied from military chants, began at Princeton University around the time of the Civil War. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were all cheerleaders.
During World War II, with many college-age men enlisted, women took up cheerleading. The war ended, and the men came back to campus, among them Lawrence Herkimer, a Navy navigator born in Michigan who returned from the Pacific theater and saw potential in the new female-dominated iteration of cheerleading.
Herkimer founded a company, the National Cheerleaders Association, and barnstormed around the country teaching the “herkie,” a jump still performed on sidelines today. He invented the pom-pom (patent No. 3,560,313) and soon acquired the moniker Mr. Cheerleader.
By the late 1960s, Herkimer was hiring hundreds of instructors for more than 150 camps teaching 100,000 high school cheerleaders around the country. Among those instructors was an ambitious young yell leader from the University of Oklahoma, Jeff Webb.
Webb worked for Herkimer in college and then after graduation, eventually becoming head instructor at his largest camps. Herkimer had no sons, and he saw a lot of himself in Webb. “I’ve been waiting 25 years for you to come along,” Webb remembers Herkimer saying. Webb had long planned to become a lawyer, but Herkimer, then in his mid-50s, made a pitch: Forget law school. Make a career out of cheerleading. At 23, Webb became general manager of the N.C.A.
Webb was quickly frustrated by Herkimer’s loyalty to the past: spirit sticks, stale cheers and modest stunts like shoulder stands. He decided to strike out on his own. In 1974, he poached 20 of Herkimer’s best instructors, and in an indication of his grand ambitions, Webb quit Herkimer’s National Cheerleaders Association and started the Universal Cheerleaders Association.
“I remember as a little girl, it was disconcerting when he broke off,” said Carolyn Herkimer, Herkimer’s daughter. “My dad had put a lot of trust in him. It was a little bit of a feeling of betrayal.”
One well-known piece of lore holds that when he split off, Webb sent Herkimer a funeral wreath with a note that read, “I’m going to bury you.” Webb calls that story a “total lie” — and its existence evidence of just how much he got into his rival’s head. Another example that Webb shares with a laugh: Once, when the power went out at Herkimer’s largest competition, a rumor spread that Webb himself was in the back, pulling out electrical cables.
Herkimer may have invented the pom-pom, but Webb knew where to use it: on TV. In 1984, he signed a broadcast deal with a fledgling ESPN to televise his cheer championships — first held at Sea World, then Disney World — and immediately reached 34 million American homes. Webb co-hosted the broadcasts, which he punctuated with personal demonstrations of pyramids and basket tosses.
The growth was fueled in part by a new category of cheerleading known as All Star. Just as travel baseball and soccer teams emerged for kids who wanted to compete year-round, dedicated cheer squads emerged, unconnected to schools or sporting events. They weren’t on the sidelines anymore; All Star cheer was the main event, showcasing routines with ever-more-daring stunts, all choreographed to earsplitting music mixes. Multiple divisions meant less-advanced children could participate. “If you could do a cartwheel, we had a team for you,” said Dennis Worley, a longtime Varsity employee who helped pioneer the All Star market.
Cheerleading was turning into an American cultural phenomenon, complete with a new breed of parent: the cheer mom, whose aspirations for her daughter made her a loyal customer of Webb’s. One mom’s obsession even turned dangerous. In 1991, after her daughter was passed over for the cheer team, Wanda Holloway agreed to pay $2,500 put a hit on a rival “pom mom” in Channelview, Texas. She was arrested instead, and the case became a global sensation.
Amid this fervor, Webb continued to expand his camps and competitions, then added a uniform division. In January 1992, Varsity Spirit — the umbrella company Webb created for his growing cheer empire — went public. By that point, Varsity had 100,000 athletes in summer camps and $28.1 million in annual revenue. When a reporter from Sports Illustrated arrived at Webb’s Memphis office, she found a copy of The Harvard Business Review on the table, maroon and forest-green wallpaper and “a Ralph Lauren motif.” Cheer had officially gone corporate.
The 1990s were boom times. Varsity gained market share and quintupled its revenues to $136 million by the end of the decade. The capstone came in 2000, when a small-budget film called “Bring It On” grossed a surprising $90 million at the box office. The movie accelerated the shifting perception of cheerleading from sideline rah-rahs to the acrobatic routines that Webb had been promoting for more than two decades. During a five-year span in the early 2000s, the number of All Star gyms, which taught this ambitious tumbling and stunting, exploded to 2,500 from around 200.
Varsity’s growing power allowed Webb to cultivate an almost imperial presence. His staff nicknamed the private jet he traveled on Cheer Force One. When he arrived on set to host ESPN broadcasts, employees joked that “the eagle has landed.” He would eventually purchase Mallard Pointe Lodge, a more than 700-acre duck-hunting estate in Arkansas, and a yacht in Florida. But what drove him wasn’t the money. It was “about discipline and keeping score,” Webb told me.
Lawrence Herkimer had retired by then, and his N.C.A. was ready to be felled. Herkimer couldn’t hide his hurt at being eclipsed by his former protégé. “It was a lucky day for him the day he met me,” he told USA Today in 2002. Two years later, Varsity purchased his company.
By the turn of the millennium, cheerleaders were now tumbling like advanced gymnasts. And yet Webb and Varsity insisted that scholastic cheerleading was not a sport. Varsity alternately called cheerleading “an athletic activity” and “more than a sport.” The company counseled the Department of Education, which enforces Title IX gender-equity requirements in college athletics, against considering cheerleading a sport. Webb has testified in federal court to the same effect. Varsity acknowledged in S.E.C. filings that if cheer were subjected to restrictions on off-season training — like N.C.A.A. sports — it would lead to a “material adverse effect on Varsity’s business.”
In 2004, Webb wrote an opinion essay in the NCAA News, arguing for a spinoff, cheer-like sport — “Something like AcroCheer might work” — that would leave the bulk of traditional cheerleading squads unrecognized. Later, the company spent more than $50,000 to lobby (unsuccessfully) against a 2015 bill in California that designated high school cheerleading an official sport and implemented stricter safety rules. Varsity told The Times that its opposition to sport status only applied to traditional cheer, and as cheer evolved to include more advanced gymnastics, the company had no objection to its receiving the designation.
Lacking a governing body, the cheer landscape in the early aughts was still chaotic. “It was the Wild West on steroids,” Worley, the former Varsity employee, said. “There were no rules — or if there were rules, they were different.” Cheerleaders regularly practiced stunts on grass and even on concrete. Some competitions allowed high-octane stunts like backflip baskets, and others didn’t. A squad that wanted to rack up points might start prepping a backflip basket just a week before a competition, which led to a surge in devastating head and neck injuries.
From 1980 to 2001, emergency-room visits for cheerleaders soared nearly 500 percent. Over that same period, competitive cheerleading was responsible for more catastrophic injuries to female athletes than all other high school and college sports combined, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. And those statistics included “bases,” the girls at the bottom of the pyramid, who were at lower risk for head injuries. Restrict the data just to flyers, the girls being tossed in the air, and injury rates became “semi-suicidal,” according to Dr. Robert Cantu, medical director of the research center.
“The flyer was the riskiest person in all of women’s sport,” he said recently. By some metrics, the risk of catastrophic head and spine injuries was higher in cheerleading than in football.
Krista Parks started cheering in the third grade, both at school and later for an All Star squad. By 2003, she was captain of the University of Memphis cheer team, a coach at Varsity camps and a respected flyer. “I lived it,” Parks said. “I was all in.”
At practice that year, as the team prepared for Varsity’s upcoming college nationals, Parks stood atop the pyramid, ready to execute a high front flip into the waiting arms of her squad. A teammate held onto her feet too long. “So instead of flipping, I just dove — like into a swimming pool with no water.” She landed on a two-inch-thick foam mat on top of concrete, breaking her neck in five places.
When teammates visited her in the hospital, they found a stranger. Most of Parks’s hair had been shaved for surgery and the rest sat in an awkward mullet, with a huge scar running around the top of her head. She underwent three operations, had a permanent shunt placed in her spine to drain fluid from her brain and endured years of physical therapy.
When Parks began speaking to a lawyer, she says the team shunned her: At bars around Memphis, she bumped into former teammates, who, emboldened by alcohol, would whisper, “We aren’t supposed to be talking to you.” She later started a cheerleader-safety foundation. When she returned for a Memphis alumni cheer event, she says former teammates wouldn’t even make eye contact with her.
Despite the alarming injury statistics, Varsity was publicly dismissive of the risks. “We are all concerned about safety, but the fact is, the injury rate for cheerleading just isn’t that high,” Greg Webb, a senior vice president (and Jeff’s brother), told The Times in 2000.
Concerned coaches tried to impose order. In 2003, Jamie Parrish, a top-tier cheer choreographer who also owned a gym, banded together with other coaches to found a rules organization, the National All Star Cheerleading Coaches’ Congress. They met in Atlanta and merged more than 40 sets of rules into a single rule book and banned certain dangerous stunts like triple-twisting layouts.
The new organization threatened Varsity’s growing control of cheer. “That really set Varsity off, like in a big, big, big way,” Parrish later testified. Within a week, Varsity created a rival group, the United States All Star Federation (U.S.A.S.F.), and bankrolled it with a $1.8 million interest-free line of credit. The U.S.A.S.F. then required that gyms purchase a membership with the organization in order to compete at Varsity competitions. “You guys don’t have the money to do your own organization,” Parrish remembered one of Webb’s executives telling him, according to a subsequent deposition. “You guys don’t need to worry with this.”
Later, litigation would allege that the new safety organization was independent in name only: Some U.S.A.S.F. staff were full-time Varsity employees who “volunteered their time”; Varsity bought its web address; and the two organizations shared office space.
Varsity now began weaving together a regulatory net that would eventually cover all of cheer. Within a few years, Varsity created USA Cheer, a governing body devoted to safety and participation, and staffed that group largely with former employees too. The company later signed an agreement with the National Federation of State High School Associations, the rule-making body for most high school sports, and paid the group $345,000 annually to be a corporate partner. According to an email from a Varsity executive in 2015, the federation, in turn, created a “squad credentialing program” for high school cheerleaders “geared toward driving summer camp enrollment,” solidifying Varsity’s control over the camp business.
The alphabet soup of abbreviations and oversight groups was confusing. Cheer insiders understood that the tentacles came from the same octopus, but parents and schools often missed it. It even appeared to escape the notice of The Times. In several articles about cheer injuries in the 2000s, the paper quoted Jim Lord, executive director of the American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators. As he echoed Varsity talking points, The Times didn’t note that Varsity had founded and financed Lord’s organization.
Despite Varsity’s early opposition, 36 states and the District of Columbia now recognize cheer as a sport. It remains an outlier: None of the National Federation of State High School Associations’ other 17 member sports have this patchwork state-by-state designation, said Dr. Karissa Niehoff, the chief executive of the federation. Nor is there another sport where a for-profit company like Varsity is so intricately linked to its governance, she said. Varsity remains a corporate partner with the federation. “I find them to be a wonderful company to work with,” she said.
Sports-medicine experts have routinely proposed making cheer a sport in the remaining states and at the college level, which would mean improved access to certified and qualified coaches, athletic trainers and medical care, limits on practice time, improved facilities and inclusion in injury-monitoring data. “There is no question in my mind that if cheerleading was declared a sport under the control of an athletic department, the number of injuries would be reduced,” Frederick Mueller, the former director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, who was among the first to draw attention to the cheer injury epidemic, wrote in 2009.
USA Cheer has found some success reducing injuries, said Lauri Harris, its executive director: A 2006 ban on basket tosses on hardwood floors, followed by a 2012 ban on double twisting dismounts at the high school level, led to a drop in catastrophic injuries. A 2021 study in The Orthopedic Journal of Sports Medicine found that emergency-room visits for cheer injuries are indeed down, but that same study stressed that visits for concussions continue to soar, increasing by 44 percent from 2010 to 2019. The increase could be, in part, a result of greater awareness of the dangers of concussions, but the risk remains high relative to many other sports: The journal Pediatrics reported in a 2019 study that the incidence of concussions during cheer practice was second only to football among high school sports.
In a response, Varsity said it created cheer’s first safety manual, in 1987, and has since invested millions of dollars in safety initiatives. Because estimates of the number of cheerleaders in the United States vary, there is some ambiguity and disagreement about how to accurately measure cheer injuries. The company cited data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which found that, in 2023, there were fewer emergency-room visits for girls ages 12-18 for cheerleading than basketball, soccer, volleyball and softball. USA Cheer concludes on its website that “cheerleading is a safe activity.”
The control that Jeff Webb was assuming over cheerleading is difficult to overstate. It was as if Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, also operated youth camps, owned Nike, hosted the N.B.A. Finals, called those games on TV and ran U.S.A. Basketball. But it wasn’t enough — Webb wanted to get bigger.
In 2014, a Varsity pitch deck began circulating around the offices of Charlesbank Capital Partners, a midsize private-equity firm in Boston that counted Harvard University among its investors. Impressed by the cheer giant’s profit margins and market dominance, Charlesbank purchased Varsity Brands — whose portfolio had grown, through a series of mergers, to include Varsity Spirit, in addition to makers of class rings, yearbooks and sports apparel — for $1.5 billion, putting up $300 million of its own cash. Most of Varsity Brands’s revenue today comes from these other companies, but the sale was a payday for longtime Varsity Spirit employees, who collectively received $79.5 million. For Webb, it was life-changing: He personally made $34.8 million, which he called “a pretty good slug of money.”
With a major private-equity firm behind it, Varsity had the war chest it needed. Charlesbank helped Varsity secure a $125 million loan facility. “We’ve got the dough for our acquisitions now,” wrote Joshua N. Beer, a managing director at Charlesbank, to his team. “Let’s make it sweat!”
The juiciest target was an event producer called JAM Brands. Aaron Flaker, one of the founders of JAM, was the rare cheer entrepreneur without a cheer background. He had quit the baseball team at the University of Louisville and learned about the cheer world when he successfully auditioned to become the school’s mascot, a cardinal. Flaker and his partners had already turned down Varsity once, in 2005. “Varsity is rolling up companies,” he said of his mind-set at the time. “Let’s roll up and fight.” JAM Brands acquired other event producers and became the Pepsi to Varsity’s Coke, controlling about 30 percent of the All Star market by some estimates.
And yet even JAM Brands struggled to compete. “They were so big,” Flaker told me with exasperation. Most cities had surprisingly few event venues that could host a cheer competition. They needed 20-foot ceilings to accommodate high-flying stunts, and plenty of floor space, but Varsity had exclusive contracts with many of them to ensure that JAM Brands and other producers couldn’t host there. Varsity’s generous loyalty bonuses to gym owners in the form of rebates hurt, too. And then Varsity began scheduling “attack events” — placing a competition in, say, Baton Rouge, La., on the same weekend that JAM Brands had an event in neighboring Shreveport, in order to peel off teams. In 2015, Flaker and his partners relented: They sold to Varsity for $32.9 million.
Varsity increased event registration fees by an average of more than 40 percent at JAM Brands and four other event producers it acquired in this period, according to a statistical analysis by plaintiffs in a subsequent class-action suit, which also alleged the company killed off some JAM Brands competitions in order to push teams toward higher-priced Varsity events. (Varsity disputes this analysis.) Today Webb says that some smaller event producers approached Varsity and asked to be acquired because they trusted him and his ability to steward their companies. “I didn’t get up one day and go, ‘We’re not controlling this whole thing,’” Webb says. “I had enough to say grace over, to be honest with you.”
And yet internal documents from that period tell a different story: Independent event producers were panicking. Varsity had created a major new competition: the Summit, a championship for lower-level teams that now generated $32 million a year in revenue for the company. The market power it gave Varsity was squeezing smaller event producers. They emailed the U.S.A.S.F. to propose leveling the playing field: The federation, not Varsity, should run all end-of-season events. The U.S.A.S.F. privately assured Varsity that it would table the idea for a future committee meeting. “It will die there without us having to publicly oppose it,” an internal memo concluded.
Still, the U.S.A.S.F.’s maneuvering on Varsity’s behalf was sometimes insufficient in Webb’s eyes, according to Les Stella, a former top federation executive for about a decade starting in 2004. Stella recalled a conversation with Webb in the late 2010s, after he had moved to another governing body, about Jim Chadwick, the U.S.A.S.F. president at the time. “I need to remind Jim why we started the [expletive] U.S.A.S.F.,” Webb said. “Not because we wanted some [expletive] governing body telling us what to [expletive] do. It was because we wanted to control the All Star market. And it [expletive] worked.” Stella was stunned. “My jaw hit the floor,” he said recently. (Webb denies saying anything like this to Stella.)
As it snapped up rivals, Varsity did not rename its new acquisitions. Rather, it maintained existing brands in order to keep parents in the dark about how much of their money was now flowing to the company, according to a draft version of a 2018 presentation prepared by investment banks working on behalf of Varsity.
Varsity introduced other practices that many parents did notice. For the Summit, held at Disney World, Varsity bought four-day Disney “park hopper” passes in bulk for $173.24 apiece and sold them back to parents for $380, according to internal documents. The company’s Stay to Play program required teams to book rooms at Varsity-aligned hotels during some competitions. Parents protested they were overpaying — the very same rooms were often available for less online. What many didn’t know was that Varsity received a guaranteed $20 per room per night, according to an expert report later prepared on behalf of parents as part of a class-action suit. “It would not be good for our customers to know how much revenue we are generating in hotel rebates,” an internal Varsity memo warned.
“WHERE is that extra money going,” asked one gym owner on Facebook about the hotel scheme. “WHY am I forced to do this to myself and my gym families?” (Varsity employees took screenshots of this comment and others, tracking the dissent.) The company would eventually rebrand the program Stay Smart, which the choreographer Jamie Parrish, whom Varsity had since hired, admitted in an internal memo was “basically putting lipstick on a pig.” “THE ELEPHANT IN ROOM,” Parrish wrote in a separate presentation, was that the company needed to find ways to “avoid being viewed as a monopoly” as it continued its buying binge. (In a statement, a Varsity spokeswoman said Parrish never held any executive or senior leadership role and that any comments from him were not reflective of the company’s corporate strategy.)
On July 1, 2015, Lawrence Herkimer died at 89 — or as his family affectionately wrote in his obituary, “Herkie jumped into Heaven.” There was now a moniker up for grabs. For decades, Herkimer had been known as the father of modern cheerleading. Sports Illustrated, meanwhile, had called Webb the sport’s “wayward son” for splitting off from his mentor years earlier. But when news agencies began calling Varsity for comment on Herkimer’s death, Webb was adamant. “I don’t want him to be called the father of cheerleading,” Sheila Noone, the vice president of public relations for Varsity Spirit, recalled Webb’s telling her. “He can be grandfather, but I should be the father.” (Webb says he does not recall this conversation.)
Webb had finally eclipsed his mentor. But he was experiencing friction with Charlesbank. One talking point that Charlesbank prepared for a meeting with Webb read, “You are uncomfortable and unhappy with the level of engagement we want in the business.” Charlesbank personnel discussed terminating his position in January 2016, according to court filings: “He is going to be very on edge that we have summoned him to New York alone to fire him.” Two months later, Webb resigned. But Charlesbank needed to keep Webb loyalists happy, a former Varsity employee with knowledge of the situation said, and so they agreed that Webb should stay on as chairman, and his protégé, Bill Seely, would soon be named president of Varsity Spirit. (Charlesbank did not respond to a request for comment.)
The U.S.A.S.F.’s ties to Varsity continued to thwart independent event producers, subsequent litigation would claim. Steve Peterson, who oversaw events for the U.S.A.S.F., was paid through Varsity. (Varsity told USA Today in 2020 that the company was reimbursed for paying Peterson “as part of an administrative agreement.”) An email from that period shows Peterson applauding a Varsity acquisition. “They are going to freak,” he wrote to Varsity employees, describing the mind-set of other event producers after the company’s 2018 purchase of EPIC Brands. “Congratulations guys!!!”
Peterson also privately mocked independent event producers’ pleas to level the playing field. “We are not the only company in jeopardy of closing our doors,” one owner wrote to the U.S.A.S.F. in February 2018. Peterson forwarded the email to Varsity headquarters with a note about its strategy: “FYI. … It’s working.” He added a smiley-face emoticon.
In June 2018, Bain, an even larger private equity firm in Boston, purchased Varsity Brands for $2.9 billion, internally citing the advantage of the “competitive moat” that Varsity Brands and Charlesbank had dug. In less than four years, Charlesbank had realized $1 billion in returns on an initial investment of $300 million. Peterson, in a subsequent deposition, admitted to personally netting more than $200,000 from the Bain acquisition through his participation — while working at a supposedly independent organization — in Varsity’s employee stock-option program. (Peterson did not respond to a request for comment.)
By the late 2010s, it was not unusual for a family to spend more than $10,000 annually per child in All Star cheer, including competition fees, uniforms, plane tickets, hotels and meals. Parents complained bitterly about rising costs. Fathers now attended competitions with a new T-shirt: “My bank account hit zero.” (It was a double entendre — to “hit zero” means to perform a cheer routine without any point deductions). Mothers worked as couriers for DoorDash and Uber Eats during their daughters’ practices. If that wasn’t enough, they were ready to pay with their blood, sweat and tears: In Crazy Moms of Cheer, a Facebook group that today has more than 46,000 members, hundreds of mothers began posting about selling blood plasma. “Can someone help a mama out and explain to me this plasma donation situation I see being commented about?” one mother wrote recently. “Who what when where why and how much? #TheStruggleIsCheer”
Gym owners were likewise hooked. Varsity gave gym owners a rebate for the money that families spent on competition fees and apparel once they met a certain threshold, using two loyalty programs, the Family Plan and the Network Program. Those programs annually doled out roughly $10 million, according to court filings, with some gym owners receiving more than $200,000 a year. Gyms with less-wealthy parents relied on those checks. But under Bain’s ownership, the company watered down the payments, shifting some of the cash rebates into apparel credits, which flowed right back to Varsity.
“We can keep them coming back for the Family Plan crack,” Jamie Parrish wrote to executives in August 2019. “Cons: Sooner or later, crack ho’s turn on their pimp wanting more crack, better crack, and for less output. How do we fix this?” Parrish suggested that Varsity reps could warn gym owners that if they continued complaining, the rebates might end: “Basically threaten the cheer community without threatening them.” Or, he wrote, the reps could suggest that Varsity might go public with the rebates and enrage parents, most of whom were likely unaware that gym owners were discreetly pocketing some of the competition fees they paid.
Lawsuits would later claim that, while Varsity grappled with how to subdue gym owners and wring more cash from parents, both the company and cheer governing bodies were ignoring troubling and even predatory behavior at gyms — a problem that was about to spill into the open.
On the morning of Dec. 2, 2017, as Bain Capital was considering acquiring Varsity, Marlene Cota, a vice president at Varsity, was volunteering at a marathon in Memphis, when she checked her email on her phone. “Is this what Varsity stands for?” she recalls the message reading. It was signed “Concerned Parent.” Attached was a photo of a young girl kneeling in front of a teenage boy, his hand on her shoulder as she simulated oral sex. Obscuring her face was a placard that read, “Cheer, we’re so MAJOR,” a reference to Majors, a Varsity competition in a few weeks’ time.
Cota was a Varsity lifer, having arrived in Memphis nearly 20 years earlier, when Varsity poached her from her marketing job at Claire’s, the accessories chain for tween girls. She had never seen such collegiality in a corporate atmosphere. “I remember thinking, All these people really like each other,” Cota said of her first impression of the company.
Co-workers shared babysitters. Greg Webb, Jeff’s brother and a longtime Varsity executive, hosted companywide Easter-egg hunts and Halloween parties. When an employee struggled to make rent, she could walk into Greg’s office, where he advanced pay with a personal check. Jeff Webb let employees borrow the corporate jet to fly home when they had medical and family emergencies.
But now, looking at the photo on her phone, she felt a tremor of apprehension. Both cheerleaders in the photo represented one of the company’s biggest customers: Rockstar Cheer, a gym franchise based in Greenville, S.C. Scott Foster, who owned the gym with his wife, regularly fielded top teams, and he cut a memorable figure, with his fake tan and sleeve tattoos. Were it any other gym, Cota might have written off the photo as a crude joke gone awry — and yet because it came from Foster’s gym, it was the latest clue for her that something might be amiss at his franchise.
Foster had come up with a generation of hard-partying cheerleaders in the 1990s and 2000s. That period was an “out-of-control frat party,” said DJ Yeager, the founder of Cheer Updates, whose Twitter account dedicated to sharing cheer-world news has nearly 250,000 followers. Except now, in the 2010s, the revelers were older, and they had money: light beer and marijuana became martinis and harder drugs.
Cheer insiders say a code of silence developed among coaches and Varsity executives. Because so many people had joined in on the “frat party,” they were afraid to point fingers. Patrick Cowherd, a gym owner who briefly served on the organization’s national advisory board in the mid-2010s, and others told me that Foster was often visibly intoxicated. “The U.S.A.S.F. knew about Scott Foster and these issues he was having,” Cowherd told me. “They were not interested in anything that could bring a bad light.” Les Stella, the former U.S.A.S.F. executive, agreed. In his opinion, he said, the governing body was preoccupied with protecting gym franchises like Rockstar that were big moneymakers for Varsity. “It’s not good, honest to say it,” he said recently.
Cota suggested to colleagues that Varsity should contact South Carolina law-enforcement officials about Foster, arguing that the photo was evidence that his franchise needed scrutiny. But the reception among her co-workers was muted, she says. Foster’s gyms were a major earner for Varsity, which in 2006 had also purchased World Spirit Federation, a cheer company he founded with his wife, during an early phase of its buying spree. Around this time, the U.S.A.S.F. suspended Foster after videos circulated online that appeared to show him drinking alcohol with young cheerleaders.
A month after Cota flagged the disturbing photo, her colleagues took her out to lunch. Afterward, she says, her lunch mates retreated to their offices and shut the doors, which was unusual. John Newby, a top executive, appeared in Cota’s doorway. “I never liked you,” she remembers him saying. Newby was flanked by another longtime Varsity employee holding a manila folder.
Cota cut him off. “Nuh huh,” she said. She called a lawyer.
“Don’t sign anything,” the lawyer said. “Don’t say another word.”
Cota says she was escorted out of the building in the freight elevator, and her company cellphone account was killed before she made it out of the parking lot. The next day, human-resources employees packed the contents of her desk into five cardboard boxes. She put them in her spare bedroom. (In a statement, a Varsity spokeswoman denied that Cota’s firing was related to concerns she raised about Foster.)
Cota had worked at Varsity for two decades. One of her children had cheered with co-workers’ children, and their families vacationed together. But just as Krista Parks felt isolated from her friends after her catastrophic injury, Cota says her colleagues ghosted her. The “cult,” as she called it, closed ranks.
In the months that followed, Cota watched as photos of Foster at cheer events circulated online, seemingly in violation of his suspension. On Aug. 3, 2018, Foster even uploaded a photo to Instagram of himself in Las Vegas with top Varsity executives and their wives.
In a 2022 Sportico article in which Cota was also quoted, Susan Crumpton, then a Varsity spokeswoman, said the U.S.A.S.F. had taken appropriate action based on what it knew at the time. “U.S.A.S.F. notified Mr. Foster that he had been found guilty of violating numerous provisions of its codes of conduct in January of 2018,” Crumpton said. “It is extremely important to bear in mind that no allegations of sexual misconduct or abuse were raised at this time.”
The industry’s secrets would keep bubbling to the surface. In September 2020, USA Today began publishing a bombshell investigative series: The paper found nearly 180 coaches, choreographers and others “affiliated with cheerleading” who had been accused or convicted of charges related to sexual misconduct — some of which had occurred at cheer gyms — but whom the U.S.A.S.F. and USA Cheer failed to ban from working in the sport. The investigations underlined for Cota, Cowherd and others what they long suspected: that both organizations had been more engaged in protecting Varsity’s market dominance than in keeping children safe.
The details in a follow-up story were damning: USA Today cited a former U.S.A.S.F. contract employee who said that, during her nearly two years working for the company, she and the organization’s membership director were the only people tasked with investigating hundreds of abuse allegations. She said she worked only a few hours a week. Months could pass before action was taken against coaches — if it was taken at all. Many cheerleaders the paper interviewed received no reply from the U.S.A.S.F. — or became trapped in circuitous email correspondence with the organization that went nowhere. Reporting forms were 15 pages long when printed and required arcane knowledge of the rule or regulation the abuser had violated.
Within days of the first USA Today story, Bill Seely, the president of Varsity Spirit, sent a companywide email to assure employees that he was taking steps to improve reporting of cyberbullying, beefing up training for staff working at camps, hiring independent experts to assess reporting mechanisms and making plans to better coordinate with USA Cheer and the U.S.A.S.F. But nearly a year later, USA Today found that individuals the U.S.A.S.F. had suspended or banned continued to participate in the sport. On a recent visit I paid to the USA Cheer website, links to the reporting forms were all dead. (After being contacted by The Times, a USA Cheer spokeswoman responded that they were now functional. The U.S.A.S.F. did not respond to a request for comment, but the organization maintains a list on their website of individuals who are restricted or ineligible from participating in All Star Cheer and Dance because of a pending investigation or sanctions.)
Dana Storms, a San Diego cheer mom, became a node in the sport’s whisper network. Her Twitter inbox was seasonal. The busy time was the spring, around the end-of-season championships. Children who were abused at those events or saw an old coach that triggered a memory finally decided to act, she says. At those peak times, Storms could get as many as 20 direct messages a week. Cheerleaders, some as young as 12, asked how to report an abusive coach on the federation’s convoluted reporting forms or how to find a lawyer. Other correspondents were middle-aged former cheerleaders, recounting decades-old abuse.
USA Today did not publish a full list of the nearly 180 names it uncovered, and Scott Foster did not appear in the series. In fact, since Marlene Cota had lost her job, his Rockstar Cheer franchise had been thriving. Foster’s elite teams dominated Varsity’s championships, and he exuded bravado. “Don’t worry about what I’m doing,” he posted on Facebook. “Worry about why you’re worried about what I’m doing.” Life was good.
Then, Jerry Harris, a fan favorite on the Netflix series “Cheer,” was convicted of sex crimes involving minors. That high-profile case, along with the USA Gymnastics scandal and the #MeToo movement, helped lift the stigma and fear around reporting abusers, and now, Foster had a real worry: In summer 2022, officials in South Carolina began looking into a report that Foster had sexually abused a girl in the area, according to a federal officer involved.
Weeks afterward, on the morning of Aug. 22, Foster got into a car with a vanity plate that read RCKSTAR and drove to a state park near his gym. He parked in the upper lot, pressed a Glock 17 under his chin and pulled the trigger.
When authorities reached his wife, Kathy Foster, she told them she was “afraid that was going to happen,” according to the coroner’s report. Her husband had “a lot of secrets.”
In a civil suit filed a week after Foster’s death, more possible victims came forward — most of them teenage athletes at his gym. Among the allegations: Foster and his wife maintained a house — called the Rockstar House — where he and his coaches plied underage athletes with alcohol and drugs. (Kathy Foster could not be reached for comment.) One boy claimed that another coach at Rockstar House had forced him to watch pornography and attempted to engage in oral sex with him. Others said that Foster would have sex with them when they traveled to competitions.
The complaint named Varsity and the U.S.A.S.F. among the defendants, claiming gross negligence, among other charges. “When complaints or reports have surfaced, or social media images and videos circulate depicting illegal activity with minors,” it read, “the Defendants sweep it under the rug, do not report to any agencies, do not strip coaches of their eligibility, and often rally around coaches who have been accused of illegal conduct with minors, even ostracizing families who have complained or reported.”
And now, finally, the floodgates opened. Lawsuits poured in from cheerleaders around the country who charged that the U.S.A.S.F. ignored or soft-pedaled their reports of sexual abuse by coaches and choreographers. Carlos Realpe, Nikki Jennings’s coach in Florida, was named as a defendant in civil litigation for supposedly failing to report the rape of an underage male athlete. (Realpe says that the gym reported the rape to the police and the U.S.A.S.F. Last month, Realpe and other coaches settled with the accuser.)
Still more litigation followed. Groups of parents, apparel makers and gyms filed antitrust lawsuits, one of which echoed the claims — leveled by Les Stella, Marlene Cota and others — that the U.S.A.S.F.’s mandate to protect athletes from sexual abuse had come into conflict with Varsity’s profit motives. Varsity’s “exclusionary scheme,” attorneys for gym owners claimed, had enfeebled oversight efforts and “allowed Varsity and the U.S.A.S.F. to resist the demand to prevent sexual abuse in the industry.”
In 2021, attorneys representing gyms saw an interview that Cota gave on HBO Real Sports about the growing abuse scandal and called her at home to ask if she had any documents that might be related to their case. Cota went to the spare bedroom where she had stored five cardboard boxes years earlier. The Varsity employee who packed up her desk had made a mistake: Inside were voluminous journals and handwritten notes from her time at Varsity, some of which outlined the company’s business tactics. She handed them over.
In four major antitrust lawsuits, lawyers combed through years of Varsity emails and presentations. They accused the company of building a monopolistic juggernaut that inflated prices for families and drove rivals from the business.
In March 2023, a judge rejected one of the antitrust cases, dismissing it with prejudice. That same month, Varsity settled a second class-action suit, from gyms and parents, for $43.5 million. Analysts from the S&P Global had already assured investors that the settlement was a mere speed bump and would “not result in any material structural changes to the company’s operations.” This spring, the U.S.A.S.F., Varsity and other defendants in the suit filed by plaintiffs at Rockstar Cheer either settled, continuing to dispute the claims, or had their charges dismissed. Varsity, Bain and other co-defendants, meanwhile, settled the antitrust suit from parents and athletes for $82.5 million.
As part of the settlements, Varsity agreed, among other concessions, to shrink the scope of the Stay Smart hotel program, to stop requiring that teams attend Varsity-run cheer camps to be eligible for end-of-year championships and not to directly or indirectly pay the salaries of any U.S.A.S.F. employees. The U.S.A.S.F. agreed not to disclose confidential information about event producers to Varsity. Varsity claims that the U.S.A.S.F. is now run “entirely independently” from the company, and reaffirmed its commitment to the safety of its cheerleaders. “Varsity Spirit’s mission is grounded in creating a safe and empowering activity for children and young adults,” a spokeswoman wrote in a statement.
In the background, the wheels of private equity were turning. This summer, KKR announced that it would acquire Varsity Brands. Those legal settlements now looked like exit tolls for Bain Capital. It was a stunning turn of events. Bain, which had presided over a calamitous six years of scandal, now seemed set to walk away with hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — in profits. Big Cheer was only getting bigger. DJ Yeager, the founder of Cheer Updates, was among those who belatedly realized that the sport had become a line item on a private-equity spreadsheet. “Bain Capital was going to get their money one way or another,” he said. “They don’t care what the industry looks like after they’re done with it.” (Bain did not respond to a request for comment.)
By this point, Jeff Webb was long gone from Varsity. After the Bain acquisition, he took another payout. But the company continued to slip from his grasp. The private-equity firm rejected his efforts to put non-Bain executives on the board, according to a court exhibit. Webb resigned in 2020.
On a sweltering afternoon in June, I met Webb at the Midtown offices of the public-relations firm representing him. He wore a navy jacket over his broad shoulders and looked even younger than his photos. He had brought his lawyer, a former U.S. attorney from Dallas, to sit in on our meeting, too. Webb was charming, self-deprecating, and beamed with a sunny optimism that befitted the country’s cheerleader in chief.
I had dozens of questions, but he had come prepared, too, with a notebook full of talking points. For two hours, he recounted the company’s growth from his spare bedroom to sprawling cheer empire. At one point he was moved to tears while reflecting on his good fortune. Speaking about the abuse scandals, Webb told me that “one incident is too many.” The USA Gymnastics case had encouraged victims from all sports, including his own, to come forward. “I think it’s a good thing,” he said.
When I asked Webb about resigning from his company, he was quick to change the subject to his new ambitions: the Olympics. Making cheer an Olympic sport is the career capstone he now craves. The man who had testified that cheerleading was not a sport was now the president of the International Cheer Union, pushing for cheerleading to be included at the games in Brisbane in 2032.
Webb was riddled with contradictions. He had written a book that warned of the dangers of corporate monopolies, but he himself has been accused of creating a mighty one. He wanted to save the American middle class — and yet his company had transformed into a wealth-extraction machine affecting those same families. He wanted to expand cheerleading, but the rising cost of All Star cheer has flatlined participation as the costs have become unaffordable for many families. I reminded him that he boasted that Varsity had grown 42 of the 43 years he ran it. But that growth had come from somewhere, specifically parents’ pockets. Was that what he had in mind when he started the company?
“No,” he said, his face reddening. “Exactly the opposite.” I asked him what he wanted on his tombstone. “Father of cheer,” as he insisted on being called years earlier? Or “entrepreneur,” whose obsession with growth had delivered the sport into the hands of private equity?
The question seemed to catch Webb off guard. He shifted in his seat. He could never have gotten the sport to these heights without the private-equity money, he said. But it had been a trap. “Once you are on that treadmill,” he said, “it’s almost impossible to go back.” And the profits? He’d made millions, but Charlesbank and Bain made billions, he said.
Cheer was too expensive, he admitted. Injuries were too high. Something had to change. “I don’t know what to say,” he said finally. His face tightened into a smile, the mask of a cheerleader. “I hope it works out for all concerned.”
And still, they come. The minivans pull up after long drives, and the families tumble out. Mothers lug garment bags with labeled pockets for bows and makeup. Gen Z girls voluntarily part with their phones and prep for their routines in convention-center hallways and hotel bathrooms. They lock arms or meditate against walls, or pray.
Music splits the air, and then they’re off: all different sizes and abilities, all playing a crucial role — stronger girls as bases, smaller girls flying up in the air, the more athletic tumbling on the mats. Fathers in custom jerseys lose their minds with delirium. Girls land stunts and then celebrate backstage — or wobble and fall and collapse into tears and group hugs.
By evening, the hotel lobby has become a giant sleepover. Kids run around in pajamas, clipping hand-painted “spirit pins” onto unsuspecting strangers’ back pockets. Parents sip espresso martinis and swap videos of the day’s tumbles and stumbles. All across America, this empire of cheer rolls on.
And then there are the broken and banished. After seven concussions and her ejection from the University of Hawaii cheer squad, Nikki Jennings, 23, still lives on Oahu. Magnesium pills help control her migraine-like “stingers.” She stretches to keep her hip injury from flaring up. When she walks into the gym where she works as a personal trainer, the thumping music opens a portal in her memory, and she imagines she’s flying through the air again, twisting and falling into her teammates’ waiting arms.
“I let myself think about it,” Jennings said, her eyes filling with tears, “but then I kind of just push on past.”
Varsity Spirit is too vast for her to contemplate. Too big to take on. So Jennings does what cheerleading taught her to do: focus on what she can control. Three days a week, she attends graduate classes online. She’s training to be a therapist, with a specialty in victims of sexual abuse and grooming.
This spring, during two weeks of in-person classes, an older classmate in her 40s pulled Jennings aside. She had been a cheerleader herself.
“I know what you’ve been through,” she said. “Nobody here gets it. But I do.”
David Gauvey Herbert is an investigative journalist based in Brooklyn.
