The Navarro cheerleaders concuss themselves with a smile, weigh themselves obsessively, do extra sit-ups at night so their abs will look perfect in the tiny uniforms that Aldama favors. Like gymnastics coaches and high-school football coaches, élite-cheerleading coaches can maintain an openly dangerous hold on their kids. A quiet, eager-to-please top girl named Morgan, who was once abandoned by her parents to live mostly alone in a trailer, looks at Aldama like a hopeful puppy, and gets emotional when she remembers how, at tryouts, Aldama remembered her name. Her cheerleaders idolize her and talk about how she’s changed their lives one former cheerleader, now a firefighter, tells the camera that he imagines Aldama’s disappointment whenever he’s late for work. She rules the program with a fearsomely controlled demeanor interrupted by flickers of maternal warmth. Navarro’s longtime coach is Monica Aldama, a brisk fortysomething with highlighted hair, long-wear mascara, a Texas accent, and an M.B.A. In six episodes, “Cheer” documents the lead-up to Daytona, and the series is a quick, compulsive watch, combining the savage thrill of watching an overdog dominate and the emotional pull of witnessing an underdog’s rise. Although the Navarro cheerleaders are some of the best college athletes in the country, they are not, as of this writing, so much as mentioned on the Wikipedia page for Corsicana, a town of less than twenty-five thousand people south of Dallas that’s otherwise most notable for its fruitcake factory. (Navarro has one real rival, the team at Trinity Valley Community College, which happens to be just down the road.) As you watch them cheer each other on in practice, you begin to see the team as an ouroboros of effort and encouragement: no one will ever support this team as much as this team supports itself. Navarro has won fourteen of the last twenty national championships its members mainly compete against one another, vying for a position “on mat,” meaning that they’ll get to perform at Daytona. Its growth as a true competitive sport has been so widely ignored that, in order to watch the National Cheerleading Association’s championship, held every year in Daytona Beach, you must subscribe to an obscure streaming service. Instagram has connected the cheerleading community in a new way-Gabi Butler, a principal character on “Cheer” and an early social-media cheer star, has more than eight hundred thousand followers-but the outside world still mostly thinks of cheerleading as sideline entertainment. There is a pathos, and an odd sort of magic, in élite competitive cheerleading that has something to do with its insularity. Greg Whiteley, the director of “Cheer,” who previously directed the college-football docuseries “ Last Chance U,” has said that the Navarro cheerleaders are the toughest athletes he’s ever filmed. Much of what the Navarro cheerleaders do onscreen was barred from competition, if not physically impossible, when I was cheering at a Texas high school, in the early two-thousands. In cheerleading, as in gymnastics, the upper difficulty level is being pushed higher at a thrilling and alarming rate. But, in slow motion, and set to music, these feats are so improbable that it can seem as though you’re watching the footage in reverse. At other points in the series, the cheerleaders wear mikes as they throw their stunts, and you can hear what it actually sounds like (something like a wordless bar fight) when bodies are thrown and caught with no protection beyond an intuited sense of physics and geometry and no padding except for muscle over bone. Another girl jumps into a basket-the foundation created when two cheerleaders lock their hands and wrists into a square-and soars twenty feet toward the ceiling, then does a back tuck in a pike position, executes two full twists, and falls into the waiting cradle as smoothly as a baseball finding a glove. One girl dives upside down, beaming, into a cradle of outstretched arms, then flings herself back upright into perfect stillness atop the shoulders of a girl who’s standing on another cheerleader’s shoulders. As it plays, the camera, in slow motion, follows a series of “top girls,” the tiny, flexible cheerleaders who are catapulted and balanced in the air during stunts. The title sequence in the first episode of “Cheer,” the new Netflix documentary series about a championship-gobbling cheerleading team at Navarro College, in Corsicana, Texas, is scored to “ Welcome to My World,” a gentle ballad from the early sixties.
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