The dictionary defines an athlete as a person who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility, or stamina. Watch a cheerleading competition and most would agree that it requires physical strength, agility and stamina to do the routines, tumbling and partner stunts that these young women do. But does that make it a sport?

The University of Maryland, College Park, is believed to be the first NCAA institution to say, "Yes."

Competitive cheerleading was added as a women's varsity sport at Maryland this year. The team, which is separate from the "spirit squad" that cheers at football and basketball games, has a 10-event competition schedule that begins in December and runs through April.

Maryland plans to offer 12 scholarships for competitive cheer by the 2005-06 school year, and a budget of $400,000 is expected by fiscal-year 2006.

Additionally, competitive-cheer team members will be required to adhere to numerous NCAA, Atlantic Coast Conference and university policies and procedures and will be provided all support services available to other varsity sports. None of these policies and procedures is required of spirit-squad members, nor do they receive similar support services.

"The No. 1 reason for adding sports was to ensure our future Title IX compliance," said Dave Haglund, Maryland's associate athletics director for varsity sports. "We've been compliant since the early 1990s, but we also looked down the road and knew that expanding opportunities for female student-athletes was becoming necessary because of our university demographics, which were changing."

Haglund said university officials looked at four women's sports -- competitive cheerleading, water polo, rowing and ice hockey -- to see which would be the most viable to bring to the school. Water polo and competitive cheer were added.

"Both water polo and competitive cheerleading had a history of seeking varsity status here on our campus" said Haglund. "There's a high level of interest in our cheer program, in terms of the people who participate and the others who try out on an annual basis."

Lauren Spates, 19, is one of the first members of Maryland's new varsity team. The sophomore journalism major from New York was a member of the spirit squad last year and said she was excited about the opportunity to compete and is hoping to receive scholarship money.

"I've always thought of myself as an athlete and I know that the rest of my teammates would agree with me," she said. "We practice very hard. What we do requires strength and agility, what we do requires skill, and I think it's very athletic in nature."

Spates, who has been cheering since the sixth grade, said she has always loved to compete, and she jumped at the chance to do more than cheer other athletes on.

"This is an amazing opportunity for women in athletics," she said. "There are thousands of cheerleaders in college who put hours and hours into their sport and they're not recognized. I know how happy it's made me and my teammates and my coaches and I would just love for other people to experience that and be able to benefit from the wonderful programs that the universities have for their athletes."

Cheering as a sport

According to the annual participation survey of the National Federation of State High School Associations, competitive cheering is one of the top 10 girls' sports in this country. In 2002-03, 4,644 schools reported having competitive cheering squads, with 111,191 participants. It ranks 10th in terms of number of schools participating, and ninth in terms of the number of participants. Basketball, with 17,028 schools and 457,165 participants, ranked first in both categories.

Maryland athletics officials say they think their varsity competitive cheering program is only the first of many.

"I actually believe it will (become an NCAA sport)," said Maryland Director of Athletics Deborah Yow. "I don't know if that means in the next five years or in 10 years, but I don't know how it can not be when it's the ninth most popular sport for women in high school. In fact, it's already recognized as a sport in 22 states."

Haglund said he remembers when sports such as bowling and equestrian were first introduced, and some questioned if those activities were sports. Bowling is now a recognized NCAA championship sport and equestrian is an NCAA emerging sport.

"I do agree that there is probably a built-in negative bias toward cheerleading, but part of that is lack of knowledge in terms of how this sport< has exploded over the last 10 to 15 years from a competitive standpoint," said Haglund. "We have every reason to believe that down the road it will become an NCAA-recognized sport."

But not everyone in the cheerleading community thinks that's necessarily the way to go.

The University of Kentucky cheerleading squad has won the Universal Cheerleaders Association National Championships an unprecedented 12 times since 1985 and was runner-up in 2003. Yet despite his squad's dominance in national competition, Kentucky head coach Jomo Thompson said he has no plans to pursue varsity status for his squad.

"That's something we're definitely not interested in," he said. "One of the reasons we get some of the most talented people in the country is primarily because they get an opportunity to cheer for Division I-A, big college events. If we were to split it up and have a cheering squad and a competition squad, the competition squad wouldn't be that good even though we have so many national championships. Part of the lure is the combination of both."

Thompson said he understands the desire to legitimize cheering as more than just standing on the sidelines and yelling, as is often the misperception. He also said cheerleaders definitely need to possess athletics ability to do what they do at games, but he doesn't necessarily consider it a sport, though Kentucky cheerleaders are eligible for scholarships.

"Our primary concern here is cheering the games," he said. "A lot of these kids are sports enthusiasts, and so am I, and if all I had to do is just compete 10 times a year, I guess I could deal with it. But not being able to sit front row for football or basketball, that would lose a lot of appeal."

Martha Elrod, director of marketing and communications for the National Spirit Group, an organization that includes the National Cheerleaders Association, also questioned the need to make cheerleading an official sport.

"What's the underlying reason for them making that decision?" she said. "From our point of view, and the teams that we're involved with, I don't understand the necessity for separating them. I think it's wonderful to acknowledge their athletics achievement because I think anyone who is new to the world of cheerleading, it's easy to have a preconceived notion about what cheerleading is and not recognize how athletic cheerleading is today.

"I just question how's that going to work if they make it a varsity sport, what that really means," Elrod said. "It seems to be moving away from the real basic foundation of what cheerleaders have always meant to schools."

NCAA guidelines

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Education, Yow noted that many schools sponsor varsity sports for women that are not recognized by the NCAA. These include women's sailing at Stanford University, Yale University, Boston College, Old Dominion University and the University of Hawaii, Manoa; and women's pistol at Ohio State University. She also noted that California State University, Fresno, added equestrian in 1996 and counted participants and scholarships in its gender-equity numbers before the NCAA recognized equestrian as an emerging sport.

Yow said that Maryland voluntarily worked with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights to ensure the school was meeting all of the office's technical guidelines.

In 1994, the NCAA membership adopted legislation to identify emerging sports for women as a means to provide increased opportunities for female student-athletes. The NCAA Committee on Women's Athletics (CWA) is responsible for making recommendations to the NCAA Management Councils with regard to selection, retention and elimination of emerging sports.

The committee considers a number of factors in determining if a sport has the potential to become an NCAA championship sport. These include:

* There must be 20 or more varsity teams and/or competitive club teams that currently exist on college campuses in that sport;

* There is support for that sport from various organizations, groups or associations, such as coaches associations or college recreation and intramural sponsorship;

* There is an understanding that once identified as an emerging sport, all NCAA institutions wishing to sponsor the sport at the varsity level must abide by NCAA regulations, and emerging-sports proposals must include information on general championship rules and format for the sport.

CWA Chair Lynda Calkins, athletics director at Hollins University, said the committee has not been approached by any school or group about going through the process to make competitive cheerleading an emerging sport. The committee, she said, has had informal discussions about the issue, but based on current information, cheerleading does not fit within the definition of sport that is used for determining an emerging sport.

For the purposes of reviewing emerging sports, a sport is defined as "an institutional activity involving physical exertion with the purpose of competition versus another team or individuals within a collegiate competition structure. Furthermore, sport includes regularly scheduled team and/or individual, head-to-head competition (at least five) within a defined competitive season(s); and standardized rules with rating/scoring systems ratified by official regulatory agencies and governing bodies."

"The rules right now don't have cheerleading as a sport," said CWA member Micheal Thompson, a professor of marketing at Delta State University. "I think what we need to do is try and find out how much interest there really is across the county. I know there's a lot of interest from other schools about having cheerleading as a sport, providing a set of rules and a competition schedule and some things that would make it a sport."

Thompson added that making it a sport "to circumvent Title IX" isn't the right reason to do so.

At Delta State, there are 16 scholarships available for cheerleading, Thompson said, and if the elements were in place to make it a sport, his school would strongly support the move.

Yow defends her school's decision to add competitive cheering as a sport, not as a means of circumventing Title IX, but continuing Maryland's commitment to equality in sports. She noted that the university has been ranked as one of the best athletics programs in the country, with its commitment to ensuring equal sporting opportunities for men and women as one of the reasons.

"We want to lead in women's sports," she said. "We saw real opportunity here."

Yow said the additional women's scholarships -- 20 in all between competitive cheerleading and water polo -- also will allow coaches to raise more scholarship funds for men's programs. While the school does not have the money to provide additional men's sports scholarships, Yow said the development staff is working with coaches to generate funds.

Yow said the decision to do more than just award scholarships for cheerleaders, as many colleges do, also has to do with the desire to compete, she said, adding that students cannot be on both the spirit squad and the competitive-cheerleading team.

Spates said that while she'll probably miss some aspects of cheering at games, she's looking forward to competing, and she hopes others will someday have the opportunity she has at Maryland.

"I think that it would be in the best interests of the NCAA," she said. "There are thousands and thousands of cheerleaders in the United States and the numbers are just growing. I think that it would be wonderful for the NCAA to recognize cheerleading. The more schools that recognize their teams as varsity, then I think the more prone the NCAA will be to recognizing us as a sport."