A 9-year-old comes home from practice unable to throw her standing tuck, a skill she’s had for years and has landed hundreds of times. A 14 year old stops eating lunch three months before competing at Worlds for the first time. A 17 year old has a panic attack in the bathroom at her last ASWC, and her coach tells her to “get her head in the game.”
This is the industry we’re in today. And we need to shed light on it.
When the World’s Greatest Gymnast Couldn’t Perform
In Tokyo 2021, Simone Biles—the most decorated gymnast in history—withdrew from multiple Olympic events after experiencing “the twisties,” a terrifying mental block where her mind and body lost connection mid-air. She couldn’t tell up from down while rotating. One wrong landing could have ended her career or worse.
The response was split. Some called her a quitter. Others recognized it for what it was: a mental health crisis happening on the world’s biggest stage.
Biles had the support system to step back. She had access to sports psychologists, coaches who prioritized her safety over medals, and a platform to speak openly about mental health. She returned to compete when she was ready, won bronze on beam, and later came back to dominate the sport again—including leading Team USA to gold in Paris 2024.
The contrast is stark. What happens to the 14-year-old athlete on your team who develops the twisties before Summit? Does she have access to a sports psychologist or a coach trained in mental health intervention? Probably not.
One of the biggest advantages Simone has that your athletes do not isn’t the latest equipment, it’s the infrastructure.
The All Star Mental Health Crisis
That infrastructure gap shows up across competitive cheerleading in devastating ways. Research into eating disorder risk among competitive cheerleaders reveals a crisis hiding in plain sight. A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that 34.4% of competitive cheerleaders, more than one in three athletes, met clinical criteria for eating disorder risk. These aren’t athletes simply “watching what they eat.” The study identified risk through dangerous weight-control behaviors including restrictive eating, excessive exercise, and use of laxatives or diet pills.
Cheerleading exists within a broader ecosystem of aesthetic sports, where performance is judged partially on appearance, that consistently show elevated rates. A 2004 Norwegian study found that 42% of female athletes in aesthetic sports showed symptoms of eating disorders. Among dancers specifically, prevalence reached 16.4% for ballet dancers.
Despite these mounting pressures, Teams invest heavily in choreography, pre-season judge reviews, and specialty coaches. But systemic mental health support does not exist.
What Ohio State Football Knows That All Star Cheer Does Not
Ryan Day, head coach of Ohio State football, lost his father to suicide when he was only 9 years old. For years, he carried that trauma alone – angry, confused, wondering why he couldn’t have a father like other kids.
Now, Day has built what many consider one of the most comprehensive mental health infrastructure in college athletics. His program employs psychiatrists, psychologists, and athletic counselors. He speaks openly about mental wellness with his players and has donated $1 million to create mental health programs. In January 2025, 37 years after his father’s death, he won a national championship.
Day’s philosophy is straightforward: Supporting mental health doesn’t make athletes less competitive. It makes them more resilient.
Day calls it his “Circle of Care” philosophy. The idea is simple, but radical in its application. You cannot separate an athlete’s mental wellbeing from their physical performance. They are not two different things. They are the same.
“Life is hard” Day tells his players. “The game of football doesn’t care, and neither does the world. So we want to be there for them. Understanding that you have physical health and you have mental health, and you need to make sure that you’re taking care of both along the way.”
The Cheer-Specific Crisis
The mental health challenges faced by youth in All Star are uniquely brutal in ways that differ significantly from traditional sports like football.
The Uniform Issue – Many of our athletes are required to perform in revealing uniforms. The sport has normalized seeing more skin on the mat than on the beach. Many athletes are judged on appearance as much as athleticism. Body image isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of the sport, it is intentionally built into the evaluation criteria. Some athletes struggle to feel confident or be able to perform fluidly in the uniforms, and others may not even try out. A University of South Carolina study found that 74% of cheer athletes found the current uniform standards negatively impacted their body image, 68% reported feeling self-concious in their uniforms, and 52% linked this back to increased anxiety. In 2025, USA Cheer published a new position statement encouraging all stakeholders in cheerleading to adopt body-positive uniform practices.
But while body image pressures are visible, the psychological barriers athletes face in skill execution often go unseen.
The Backwards Problem – Mental blocks disproportionately affect backwards tumbling skills compared to forward skills. An athlete may be able to land a front punch, but find that their back tuck stalls out. It’s not about the skill. The brain’s fear response physically blocks the athlete from performing the skill without seeing where they’re going. This compounds pressure on the mat, where teams are significantly more likely to perform tumbling skills backwards.
“Mental blocks are often viewed as the beginning of the problem when they’re actually the end result – a build-up of pressure, emotional dysregulation, and a lack of recovery strategies.”
— Jeff Benson, Mental Performance Coach and Founder of Mind Body Cheer
The Age Compression – Eight-year-old children train like professional athletes, while eleven-year-old girls join social media to compete for attention and validation. The sport normalizes injury and pain as part of the process. Athletes are being pushed further, at younger ages, despite the reality that not all athletes will reach elite levels.
We’ve advanced our physical training — athletes are doing harder skills at younger ages, but we haven’t evolved in how we support, communicate with, or train them mentally. The imbalance is catching up to us.”
— Jeff Benson, Mental Performance Coach and Founder of Mind Body Cheer
The Financial Pressure – Despite advances in the industry, there remain very few “full ride” college scholarships and no full-time professional career paths. The odds of professional success in any sport are low. All Star cheerleading is expensive and costs continue to rise. Financial stress compounds everything. According to the Aspen Institute’s 2024 national survey, general youth sports costs have risen 46% since 2019, twice the rate of inflation. All Star cheerleading costs range from $8,000-$15,000 per athlete, placing it among the most expensive youth sports in America. These estimates are before travel, hotels, food, entry fees, last-minute choreography, skills camps, or private lessons. Athletes can feel the financial strain when cheer expenses make their family budget tight.
The Identity Crisis – Is All Star considered an objective sport or a performance art? The answer matters beyond aesthetics or philosophical debate. Sports have sports psychologists, sponsors, and investors. Activities classified as performance art rather than sport often lack access to these resources. If All Star isn’t recognized as a sport, funding of mental health support becomes even harder to secure across the industry. And without alignment on what the industry represents, forward progress remains the key concern.
The Coaches Training Gap
Most coaches care deeply about their athletes. The industry has a way of keeping people involved, with many who want to help build something better than what they experienced as athletes. But caring isn’t the same as having the tools to implement systemic mental health support.
Patterns have emerged in gyms across the nation:
- Coaches tell athletes with mental blocks to “just go for it” or “trust yourself”
- They ignore warning signs of disordered eating as long as the athlete is still hitting their skills.
- They treat mental health therapy as an optional activity athletes can do on the side, separate from training
- They confuse mental toughness with emotional suppression
- They use shame and pressure as motivation tactics
- They measure success exclusively by placements
These approaches typically come from coaches who are doing the best they can with what they have. The industry has failed to provide the tools or training in mental health support. But intent doesn’t matter when athletes are suffering. And psychological injuries often last much longer than physical ones, tending to follow athletes long after leaving the leave the sport.
The contrast with other competitive sports is stark. The NCAA now mandates annual mental health screenings for all Division I student-athletes and requires institutions to provide licensed mental health providers. According to the NCAA’s 2024 Mental Health Best Practices guidelines, schools must create formal plans to promote mental wellness, identify at-risk athletes, and provide appropriate care pathways. Meanwhile, All Star cheerleading, where athletes face comparable or greater pressures, operates without any equivalent infrastructure.
Industry organizations have begun to acknowledge these challenges, though formal infrastructure remains limited. The U.S. All Star Federation (USASF) has released statements encouraging athlete wellness and offers optional SafeSport modules addressing emotional misconduct and awareness. A handful of gyms and event producers have also hosted sessions on mental health and coaching empathy in recent seasons. However, there are currently no standardized requirements, certifications, or funding models across All Star cheer to ensure consistent mental health support for athletes or coaches.
Building a Circle of Care
The All Star industry needs its own version of Day’s Circle of Care model.
Every gym, regardless of size or budget, should implement a mental health protocol as part of their safety procedures? Every summer conference should prioritize mental health training alongside skills and business development.
Coaches need to be trained to recognize warning signs of eating disorders, anxiety, depression, and trauma responses. And then provided the tools to communicate effectively with athletes’ parents and support systems to actually make a difference.
The industry must begin discussing mental blocks the way it discusses physical injuries. Parents need education on how to support their children’s mental health instead of unknowingly exacerbating the issues.
The definition of toughness must expand to include vulnerability, asking for help, and knowing when to rest as strengths rather than weaknesses.
Ryan Day created the blueprint with Ohio State Football — and proved it worked with his national championship. You can start building that same culture of care in your gym, your team, and your home today.
Resources for Coaches, Parents, and Athletes
- Mind Body Cheer — Jeff Benson’s program dedicated to mental performance training and athlete wellness within the cheer and gymnastics communities.
- The Kids Mental Health Foundation — Free educational resources, professional training, and family tools for supporting youth mental health.
- The U.S. Center for SafeSport — Official organization providing abuse-prevention and emotional wellness education for youth sports organizations.
- National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) — Nationally recognized nonprofit offering helplines, youth programs, and community-based mental health education for families and coaches.
- Squad Safe “A Practical Guide To Athlete Welfare & Cultural Change In Cheerleading” — This resource and book offers coaches and gym owners practical safeguarding frameworks, psychological-safety protocols, and culture-change tools built specifically for cheerleading. “Coaches often don’t realise the power they wield. They can lift someone or cut them down with a single sentence, a sentence that could stay with them for life.” — Gamper Cuthbert.
The athletes we raise in All Star cheer will carry more than banners. They’ll carry the lessons we teach them about pressure, perfection, and worth.
We’ve mastered how to build strength and endurance. Now it’s time to master how to build safety, empathy, and care. Because a routine can win a title, but only a healthy athlete can sustain a legacy.
