I just read another story where the cheerleaders:
A. Ran the school's social scene.
and
B. Vote in or out the other cheerleaders
I don't know about the rest of you, but that wasn't the way it was when I was in school. Admittedly, that was over 50 years ago. Our cheerleaders were elected by the student body the year previously. Yes, they were prominent in the social scene, but they were not the all-powerful bitches that I see in some stories on this site.
I don't think I ever went to a school that had cheerleaders at all. They're not as popular in Canada in the first place and I mostly went to private schools, so the girls just had their own sports teams anyway. No reason to cheer the boys when you can play in your own league.
Of course, I don't really remember big cliques, either. Even the two years I went to public school my entire grade was fewer than 100 kids. The private schools were smaller than that. There are different friend groups, but not enough kids for true cliques.
School size matters a great deal. At fewer than 100 kids in a grade, everyone can know everyone, more or less. My high school was in the low 400s per grade. My kids' first high school was about 50 per grade; the high schools they actually graduated from were around 1200-1500 per grade. The dynamics were hugely different.
Size usually matters a great deal in all sorts of things, as a tubby 500-pounder ain't setting any track records, whatever the school and class sizes. Just like larger book tend to be more, unyieldly and tedious? ;)
Yep, it's mostly a Hollywood fantasy premise. However, when I was in high-school back in the '70s, the cheerleaders WERE incredibly self-entitled bitches so the whole premise of HS cheerleaders connecting with 'average guys' is just as ridiculous. They're fun, but utterly unbeleivable.
Not for me. Our cheerleaders (late 70's) never came off as entitled. Nor were they the prettiest girls in the school — they were athletic and energetic, but that was about it. Maybe I just went to a boring school.
Well, two out of my three high-schools were larger than my college was, so that's probably indicative of … something. And by a significant factor too.
But then, they'd never consider dating me, just as I never considered asking them either, so my views on the matter may be just a tad biased. But mostly, I was just a nerd, getting by as best I could so I could graduate and move on. We did have cheerleaders in college, yet they were entirely different than our HS cheerleaders.
Back in the early 60's in NJ, Cheerleaders had to try out for the Cheer coach just like all the boy's sports. There were the Varsity and the JV teams. Varsity members qualified for "Letters" just like the varsity football team. Once they passed try outs, the members of each team elected their own captain and assistant captain. I don't remember them ruling the social scene. But then again, neither did the football stars. I remember one of the backs asked me, a lowly nerd, for a ride to our senior prom for him and his date.
My story "Spring Break - When it all began." includes a flashback scene where that is how several people in the story become cheerleaders.
It's set in an alternate history universe that includes several major differences - including the state of Texas being in a country that almost exclusively has used the metric system for over 210 years at the time of the story.
Our cheerleaders had tryouts with the cheer coach deciding who to accept.
As for social groups, there were basically three — cheerladers/jocks; stoners; nerds/geeks. Nobody dominated the school, but the groups were pretty well defined (this was late 70s, early 80s).
Ditto for our cheerleaders. Our social groups were a bit different, though. Some of the jocks hung out together, but mostly they were part of the general flow of the school — many (most?) of them took a lot of pride in their scholastic accomplishments and were supporters of the nerds and geeks. The only group that seemed to keep to themselves were the large contingent of ag/FFA people. They could be a bit standoffish.
Ditto for our cheerleaders, on which my story's treatment of cheerleaders are based. The squad itself was determined by the cheer coach, with the leadership within the squad voted in by the cheerleaders themselves. The general student body had absolutely no input on the cheerleading squad at all.
That said, odds are that the cheer coach and the head cheerleader would be fairly close and the coach would likely listen to the head cheerleader both in terms of 'you should give her a chance' and 'no, not that one.' That's an informal relationship, to be sure, but if the head cheerleader felt strongly that someone was either a really good fit or a really bad fit, a wise coach would probably listen.
In terms of social groups, I have the 'socialites' (generally people with truly rich parents or those who could get close enough to one of them to join the clique), the 'jocks/cheerleaders', the 'stoners', and the 'nerds/geeks' (which have subsets). On the other hand, it's an academically superior school (~10% of the student body at the National Merit Scholarship level - top 0.5% nationally, ~70% of the student body taking at least some honors classes, 99% of the student body going to college), and that means many of the people outside of 'nerd/geek' would be 'nerd/geek' at most schools.
For various reasons, band is in the cheerleader/jock orbit much more than the others, while orchestra/choir/etc are not.
Amusingly, my story's college destination (Texas A&M) features 'Yell Leaders' rather than cheerleaders. Yell Leaders are all male (always have been, since it dates back to the university being an all-male school) and are elected by the student body. The majority come from the Corps of Cadets even today (even though the Corps is well under 10% of the student body), but it's not a requirement.
Remember that most of the cheerleader stories here are erotic fantasies. I've posted a couple of them. And, yeah, the cheerleaders in my stories have nothing in common with the ones in my high school.
Except for competitive cheerleading, cheerleading is last century. The real hot girls are now on the dance team.
Well, the 'hot' white girls and those who associated with them. Otherwise in the black community, it's the step dancers who receive most of the attention, from their peers, not the supposed trend setters. Of course, I don't think 'stepping' is even a thing anymore, as I haven't had any kids attending HS in quite a few decades.
Even 60+ years ago, we had Caucasian, Negro, and Oriental girls on the cheer team. Since it was an Ivy League College town, we had a mix of people in our high school from all over the world: from all parts of Europe; the UK; Africa; the Middle East; India; China; Japan; Korea; South America; and even one family from Australia.
It's a situational trope. Easy shorthand so that a writer doesn't have to establish everything about the world/setup and can get straight into their story.
Our cheerleaders were self-organized volunteers, pretty much effort of one girl. I don't remember, perhaps didn't ever know, did she succeeded to make it official and lasting (she graduated the same year than me). The sport they cheered on was basketball, possibly even exclusively so, but then, there wasn't much else either.
When I moved to the school for the fifth grade, it was in Soviet Union and remained there for several years still, but when I graduated high school from the same school, it was... not quite in EU and NATO yet, no, but joining both within next ten years was seen as survival dictated goal and practical inevitably.
Back in Soviet Union youth sports were wholly parallel to school system and under wide umbrella of military, although I'm not sure about the status of "prof-tech" vocational sports school(s) that caught international level athletes and future coaches, perhaps it was hybrid under both or something. Otherwise sports that happened in school gyms after hours weren't schools affairs, but facility rentals by sports clubs, while schools employed no coaches beyond PE teachers. I may not have paid attention previously, but only remember school-to-school games after independence, and those weren't fully official either, rather tolerated than administered, and very much unserious, although some got quite invested in those nevertheless of course. To the point a cheerleader team spawned itself.
It was a time when the yearly inflation was 1000% and police refused to react on calls claiming their vehicles are out of fuel, but the life in high school at least and even more generally I'm sure, soldiered on, in hindsight surprisingly normally.
With a tad bit over thousand students in the entire school, first to eleventh (later twelfth, with renumeration happening throughout, as it was zeroth grade made compulsory what triggered it), our school was large by local standards, but not a very large one; there were a few twice that size. Tracking inheritance from the first public school for girls in the city and located in the heart of the old town (with exactly six car parking spaces officially attached) it juggled egalitarian spirit with subtle elitism in undertones eschewing restoration of "gymnasium" moniker in contrast to some others.
There were cliques, just quite different, and changing ones. Jocks? Sure there were some, even though sports not an integral part of school itself, but that community was quite fragmented. Basketball dominated, being very democratic, easy to set up class-vs-class tournaments and similar (think homeroom vs homeroom, only our "homeroom" was a permanent affair fist grade till graduation). Curiously, state politics at one point were dominated by social networks stemming from amateur and college basketball dubbed "basketball mafia." While ice hockey might have more vocal if not necessarily bigger fan base, it didn't manifest in any discernible way in school at all, but football was frowned upon in our school's dominant ultranationalist environment for being too Russian dominated (soccer of course; we would call that game some derivative of rugby it is, and pretty much no-one knows a first thing about American football here anyway, it doesn't exist, neither does baseball by the way).
Politics were hyper important, but our school didn't have Russian flow, so that conflict was absent, at least internally (besides dedicated Russian schools, many nominally Latvian schools had Russian "homerooms" that had their instruction almost exclusively in Russian; ethnic-adjacent political conflict and confrontation was common in such mixed schools, especially at this transitional period.
Instead we had... let's call them "suits" a clique of self-described "future business leaders" who were extremely focused on academic achievement (but often in a cheaty or formal way, without true engagement with the material) and were extremely obnoxious, cynical and snobbish, despite being sneered on by much about anyone else.
While pretty much everyone who mattered in student society was in some way connected to the drama club. The informal, alternative one, not the official one. Neither was actually functional, in terms of staging any production. This networked influence was less strange, if you consider it only mirrored the national resistance movement that was led and populated by poets, writers and artists.
However, the school was taken over by a sophomore gang at one point. Loosely led by six "brothers" it eventually included or at least affiliated about half of that sophomore year, a third of then juniors and many others, even some seventh graders. This non-organization was responsible for well over 80% of all extracurricular activities in the school for next three years, including dance nights that happened so frequently the principal was forced to issue an edict that dances can't happen in two consecutive fridays.
School newspaper wasn't a clique, it was an individual, more or less (for whom it was pocket money business, perhaps more than anything else, pocketing money trickling from Soros fund over a long cascade). And yes, he was a nerd from the same drama club, but was never fully accepted by the "brothers" or invited to their private parties...