My mom signed me up for cheerleading tryouts in college to fill my time. I was a multi-sport athlete my whole life, so the logic made sense to her. Football, baseball, lacrosse, gymnastics, Ju-Jitsu, Olympic weightlifting. I had done it all. Cheer training was just the next thing on the list.

Except I had no idea what I was walking into.

Everyone around me seemed to already speak a language I had never heard. They knew the terms, the skill levels, the competition structure, the lingo. I had none of it. And for the first time in my athletic life, I found myself genuinely struggling to learn a sport. Not struggling a little. Struggling more than I ever had before.

That was the moment I fell in love with cheerleading.

Why Cheer Is the Hardest Sport I Have Ever Done

I have competed in a lot of sports at a serious level. Nothing has challenged me the way cheerleading has, and there is a specific reason for that.

Every stunt involves two or more people. Each person has a role, and if anyone fails to execute their part, the stunt fails. There is no going around it, no compensating, no getting lucky. You either hit or you do not. And unlike almost every other sport, there is no universal road map for how to get there. No standard curriculum. No agreed-upon technique that gets passed down consistently from coach to athlete. People are largely figuring it out as they go, experimenting with what works, and unknowingly building habits that will slow them down for years.

I watched this play out as I started coaching. Athletes working incredibly hard with no real guide for what proper technique looked like. Coaches doing their best with the knowledge they had, which was often the same patchwork approach they had been taught themselves. Time getting wasted. Frustration building. It stuck with me.

What 250 Clinics Taught Me

After starting Hybrid Cheer in 2021, we hit the road. For years, the business was almost entirely in person. Traveling clinics across the United States, and eventually beyond. Then our first gym location in Jacksonville. We were showing up, getting in the room with athletes and coaches, and doing the work directly.

We’ve now hosted over 250 clinics and trained more than 2,000 athletes and coaches along the way. In every gym, in every city, across every skill level and program type, we kept hearing the same thing.

There is no accessible resource for proper technique. Especially for stunting.

Athletes knew they were struggling. Coaches knew their teams were stuck. But the guidance they needed was either unavailable, inconsistent, or locked behind expensive access that most programs could not justify. We were correcting technique at clinic after clinic and watching athletes respond immediately with, “That’s so much easier. Why was I never taught that?”

The results were real. But the reach was limited. We could only be in one place at a time, and the problem we were solving was everywhere.

Why We Brought Hybrid Online

Every other serious sport has a standard. A baseline of technique and progression that coaches teach and athletes learn, regardless of where they are in the country or what level they are competing at. Cheerleading does not have that. What you learn depends almost entirely on who you happen to have access to, and for most athletes and coaches, that access is thin.

That gap is what pushed us to build the Hybrid Library. Not just to create another training resource, but to start establishing something the sport has never really had: a credible, consistent, accessible foundation for how these skills are actually supposed to be taught and learned.

The athletes who benefit most from proper technique instruction are not always the ones lucky enough to be near an elite program or within driving distance of a Hybrid gym. They are in small towns. They’re on teams with coaches who are doing their absolute best without having ever been taught the higher level skills themselves. They are serious about their development and have nowhere to turn.

Bringing Hybrid online was not a pivot away from the in-person work. The clinics and gyms are not going anywhere. It was an acknowledgment that the problem is bigger than what any amount of traveling can solve. The only way to actually move the needle for the sport is to make proper technique instruction available everywhere, all the time, to anyone who wants it.

Introducing Bonde on Cheer

That same mission is what drives our new podcast. Bonde on Cheer is a weekly show about building better athletes and better programs. Every episode is an honest conversation about athlete development, coaching, team culture, training, and the lessons that only come from years spent in the gym and on the road.

YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

This is not a highlight reel. It is the real, ongoing work of figuring out what it actually means to set a standard in cheerleading, and sharing that process openly so that coaches and athletes everywhere can benefit from it.

The sport is growing faster than the infrastructure around it. The tools athletes and coaches have access to should reflect where the sport is headed, not where it has been.

Where to Find Us

New episodes of Bonde on Cheer drop weekly. Full show notes for every episode live here on the Hybrid Cheer blog.

If you want elite stunt tutorials taught by National Champions and Team USA members available whenever you need them, you can get access to the Hybrid Library HERE.