Cheerleading Games For Practice

Why Most Teams Skip Drills and Jump Straight to Drills Nobody Uses

I used to spend an entire Saturday practice running the same six tumbling progressions until everyone was miserable, then wonder why nobody came back Monday. It wasn't a motivation problem. It was that we had no structure between the conditioning and the stunting, so by the time we got to routines, people were already fried. That's when I started building out a proper set of Cheerleading Games For Practice — not fluff, not carnival games, but actual skill-reinforcing drills that look like something fun until you realize you've done forty rounds of basket toss prep without noticing. The ones that actually move the needle are the ones where the game mechanic forces you to repeat a skill under mild pressure. Here's what works. Set up two lines facing each other about thirty feet apart, spaced wide enough that no one bumps into a neighbor. The front person does a round-off back handspring tuck, jogs back, taps the next person in line, and takes the end of their own line. Next person goes. If someone wobbles out of a landing or misses the skill entirely, they go again from the top — no retrying in place. That's the whole game. It takes about twelve minutes to run a full set with a team of twenty-four, and it stacks up reps fast. The mild time pressure makes people focus harder than they would if you just called "do five round-offs" over and over.

The edge case I keep running into is when your flyers or bases aren't strong enough to be in the same line. I used to split them by position and it worked poorly. Instead, I mixed positions within each line and let whoever was weakest carry themselves through the repetition. The stronger people finished faster but didn't get to skip — they stayed in line and went again once the person ahead of them cleared it. It levels the playing field without needing a separate drill.

Partner Drill Games for Stunt Grouping

Hand-to-hand partner work is where most teams hit a wall before competition season, so I built a game around it. Two partners face each other, fifty centimeters apart, one foot from being able to touch. One person reaches forward into a shoulder sit base position while the partner lifts their foot and steps into the catch. Instead of counting reps, they count successful catches out loud, and the other person calls out a color — red, blue, green, yellow. The partner catches only on red. If you call red and they catch anyway, that's a point against them. If you call any other color and they don't catch, also a point against them. You play three rounds of three minutes each. It sounds trivial, but hand placement and eye contact during those catches improves dramatically because players can't go on autopilot. One thing people miss is that the color call should come right before the reach, not after. I learned this when a group kept catching too early because the signal was coming late. We switched to calling the color mid-reach and it immediately cleaned up timing. That's one of those counter-intuitive things — usually you think the cue should come before the action, but in this case it has to arrive during the action so the partner adjusts on the fly.

Pyramid Speed-Building Game

For pyramid building, I use a modified version of the old "clean it, knock it down, rebuild it faster" approach, but with a twist. Everyone in the pyramid group gets assigned a position — back base, front spotter, flyer, etc. The group builds a basic extension lift, holds for two seconds, then all dismounts simultaneously by counting off. Then they rebuild from scratch. Each successful rebuild counts as one point. The goal is to hit ten points in eight minutes. The constraint that makes it useful is that no one can start rebuilding until every person is back at their starting position after the previous dismount. That means you're practicing both the assembly and the reset, which is where most pyramids stall in competition anyway. The downside to this game is that it can encourage rushing if your team isn't coached on dismount mechanics first. I had a team do this once and two flyers popped out of their spots because they were so focused on speed that they ignored their spotting cues. We fixed it by adding a rule: any dismount where a spotter doesn't call out "safe" counts as zero points for that round. It sounds minor, but it forced people to verbalize and listen again instead of just going through the motions.

Cheer Dance and Routine Fragment Games

When you're working on a new cheer or routine segment, breaking it into sections and running them in random order keeps the brain engaged better than the usual top-to-bottom repetition loop. I write out the sections on index cards — jump section, tumble pass, dance break, motion sequence — and put them in a hat. A player draws two cards, runs both sections straight through without stopping, then draws again. If they mess up a count or miss a transition, they restart that particular pair. It usually takes forty-five to sixty minutes for a full squad to cycle through every combination once, and by the end of it, nobody remembers which section came first in the routine, which is exactly the point. Competitions don't run in order anyway — they throw you into your run and expect you to know it cold. A limitation here is that this works best for short routines. If your full routine is longer than ninety seconds and you have six or seven distinct sections, the combination count explodes and you either run out of practice time or end up repeating the same pairs constantly. In that case, I break it into two groups of sections and rotate which group gets practiced each session.

Conditioning Games That Don't Feel Like Punishment

Most teams do burpees until everyone hates them. I replaced our conditioning block with a partner bear crawl race. Two partners start on all fours, backs toward each other, arms locked behind the other person's back, and they move laterally across the floor together. If one person breaks the hold, they start over. The floor is marked at twenty feet on each side. First team to complete five successful crossings wins. It takes eighteen minutes for a squad of twenty to complete a full set, and it hits core, shoulders, and hip flexors without feeling like a separate workout. The issue is floor space — you need at least four parallel lanes side by side, which isn't always possible in a tight gym. When space is limited, I switch to a stationary version where partners hold the position for increasing time intervals instead of moving laterally. There's a simple game I run when transitions keep falling apart. Two players stand in the center of a circle of eight. They pick a skill name out loud — say "arabesque pop" — and the rest of the circle responds with a different skill name immediately, not thinking about it. If two people say the same thing or hesitate more than a second, they swap in. The goal is to keep the two center people rotating for two minutes straight. It forces quick decision-making and verbal clarity, which translates directly into better callouts during actual stunt sequences. I first tried this with a freshman squad and they lasted forty seconds before someone said "jump" and the rest of the circle just repeated "jump" back. We worked on it for three practices and they got to a full two minutes by week four. The progression matters — start with just three people in the center and work up. None of these games work unless someone is tracking reps and keeping score. If you run a relay without a scoreboard, people stop caring about the times and drift back into casual effort. Same with the partner drill games — the point system is what makes them training instead of playtime. Assign one coach to call colors, another to count catches, a third to time the pyramids. Even with a small staff, you can cover it if you rotate roles every few minutes so nobody zones out.

The one area I won't recommend these games for is injury rehab. If someone is coming back from a shoulder or knee issue, running them through a high-rep game with time pressure is how you get them hurt again. Keep them on isolation drills until they've cleared full-contact work with a medical professional. I had a flyer return early from a wrist sprain and we put her in a tumbling relay by accident. She missed a landing, rolled her wrist again, and was out for another three weeks. That one costs time and money, so don't shortcut the clearance process.