Practice Whats In My Cheer Bag

What Practice Whats In My Cheer Bag Actually Is and Why You Should Use It

It is a printable and digital practice tool designed for cheer squads to memorize their equipment roster and supply checklists. You grab the list, you cover the items, and you quiz yourself or your teammates on whether each piece belongs in your team bag. Simple premise, and most teams treat it like a warm-up routine before competitions. I have been running this through my squad for about four years now, and the main benefit is not about passing a quiz. It is about preventing the kind of emergency where you pull up to a competition and realize half your megaphones are missing, your rally towels ended up in last season's storage bin, or someone forgot to pack the athletic tape because nobody actually checked the inventory.

Practice Whats In My Cheer Bag

Here is how I set it up and run it without turning it into a chore that nobody takes seriously. First, you need a master list. Do not just use the default template you find online and call it a day. Every team packs differently. I keep a living document in Google Sheets that lists every single item by category: megaphones, pom sets, music drives, first aid supplies, water bottles, uniforms, extras like replacement bows and velcro repairs, and the random stuff that always gets lost. I have columns for quantity, condition, last inspection date, and who is responsible for that category. Then you convert that into the Practice Whats In My Cheer Bag format. Print it out as a two-column worksheet where one side lists the items and the other side is blank for players to check or recall. Some people laminate these and use dry-erase markers. Others just use regular paper and keep a separate answer key. I prefer laminated because we go through them fast and they survive being thrown in gym bags.

The actual practice method is straightforward. I call it out during the first ten minutes of warm-up on competition day or at the start of a new session. One person reads an item from the list, and the designated player either confirms it is in the bag or flags that it is missing. We go through the full roster every single time. It takes about twelve minutes for a team of twenty. There is one edge case that almost cost me a regionals qualification, and it is worth mentioning because nobody talks about it. A few years ago, we had a substitute megaphone battery that looked identical to our primary set, but it was actually dead. I checked the list, the megaphone was there, I marked it good, and we drove to the venue. Two hours later we needed to run a skit and that megaphone would not turn on. The issue was not on the standard checklist because nobody wrote down that we had swapped the battery type mid-season. The workaround was simple: I added a sub-category field to the master list called "special notes or variations." Now every item has a line for anything non-standard, and before we pack, I do a quick visual sweep of that column. It added maybe ninety seconds to our packing process and saved us from that exact problem happening again. Another thing that trips people up is overloading the list. Beginners tend to put every single hairpin, every extra roll of tape, and every water bottle label on the same sheet. That makes the practice session drag and people stop listening. Keep it to the items that actually matter for the event. If it is not competition-critical, it does not need to be on the practice sheet. You can keep a separate full inventory for the coach, but the practice version should be tight and focused.

You also need to rotate who runs the quiz. If the same person reads the list every time, the rest of the squad zones out. I assign a different reader each session, and I mix up the order so people cannot just memorize the sequence. Randomizing the order forces actual recall instead of pattern recognition. The biggest limitation of this tool is that it only works if the list is accurate. If your master inventory is outdated, the practice is useless and worse than useless because it creates false confidence. I have seen teams run the Practice Whats In My Cheer Bag perfectly, feel fully prepared, and then arrive at a meet with expired first aid supplies and cracked megaphone cones because nobody updated the source list after last season's cleanup. Set a recurring calendar reminder to audit the master list at least once per month during the competitive season. Take fifteen minutes, walk through the actual bag, and cross-reference everything on paper. That audit takes more effort than the daily practice but it is the only reason this system functions. If your team struggles with this method, the alternative is to move it to a digital flashcard format using something like Anki or even a simple quiz app. Digital tools force spaced repetition and track your accuracy over time. The downside is that you lose the tactile element of physically opening the bag and verifying the item exists. A hybrid approach works best: use the printable sheet for the actual gear check, and use the flashcard app for off-site memorization during travel or home study.

Download templates and ready-to-print versions are available from a few cheer coaching resource sites, but I usually just build my own because the free ones tend to skip the categories that actually matter. If you want a starting point, search for "cheer bag inventory checklist printable" and adapt it rather than using it raw. The template is a skeleton. Your specific gear list is the body. Most teams I know run this for about two weeks straight before a major competition and then taper off to once a week during the regular season. The intensity correlates with how close you are to an event where a missing item is genuinely disruptive. If you are practicing for a local scrimmage, five minutes of casual review is enough. If you are preparing for state, you run the full protocol every session until the trip. One final note on tracking progress. I keep a simple log next to the practice sheet where the reader initiales the date and notes any missed items. Over a season, that log shows you which items your team consistently forgets. For us, it was always the backup music USB drives. Once we identified the pattern, we assigned a dedicated person whose only job was music drive management. That eliminated the misses entirely. The Practice Whats In My Cheer Bag tool does not just help you remember what to pack. It reveals where your team's weaknesses are, and that is the part most coaches miss.