Cheerleading Competition Preparation vs. Outcome: What You Can Actually Control

Cheerleading competition preparation looks different for everyone. Coaches are mapping out practice schedules and building routines. Athletes are drilling skills, studying counts, and pushing themselves in the gym. But no matter how much work goes in on both sides, one of the most common mistakes in this sport is letting the outcome become the measuring stick for all of that effort. The truth is, preparation and outcome are two entirely different things, and only one of them is yours to own. Understanding that distinction, and actually leaning into it, is one of the most powerful shifts a cheerleader or coach can make.

Let’s define both terms clearly:

Preparation: all that we do leading up to an event to influence the outcome
Outcome: the result of the event

Now this doesn’t just relate to cheer specifically—this spans across all facets of life and is in fact one of my favorite topics to discuss.

Preparation

For starters, we control one of these things and not the other. Can you guess it? That’s right: we control preparation. We as individuals control how much time and energy we dedicate to preparing for any event in life. And in doing so, we influence the outcome.

One of my favorite questions to ask the athletes and teams I work with is “You all know the saying you can lead a horse to water, right?” and it’s in those moments that I realize I’m getting old because I’m met with blank stares… For those who aren’t familiar, the idiom is, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” This means you can provide someone with opportunities, guidance, or resources, but you can’t force them to take action or accept help if they aren’t willing or motivated to do so themselves. It highlights the limits of influence, showing that ultimately, personal choice and internal motivation are required for someone to benefit from an offered help.

What We Can Control

So, Coaches, this means we control how often we have team practice, the duration of our team practices, the structure of our team practices, the elements we put in our routines, etc. Athletes, we control how focused we are at practice, how much time we allocate to proper sleep, diet, and exercise, how much work we put in outside of practice, how well we know our counts, etc. Parents, we don’t have a lot of control here but we should focus on one very important factor here: how much pressure we put on our athletes (this is where a lot of mental blocks come from (but more on that at a different time)).

All this to say that we all play a unique role in successful preparation based on what we do and do not control. Understanding that and capitalizing on it is what makes the team dynamic a powerful, but tricky one. Focus on what you control and influence and help others do the same.

Quick sidebar here:

There is a cognitive bias called the fundamental attribution error. This cognitive bias occurs when we judge others’ behavior on their personality of fundamental character, but we attribute our own behaviors to situational factors.

i.e. If Sarah is late to practice, it’s because she’s a lazy person and doesn’t take team practice seriously. If you’re late to practice, it’s the traffic and weather’s fault.

Be a good teammate/coach, try to catch yourself in situations where you are judging someone else’s behavior on their personality in a way that you would blame external factors in the same scenario.

Outcome

Now the part we don’t control—the outcome. This is one of the most frustrating components of life. We can work tirelessly, pour our heart and soul into something and still fall flat or land short. Happens all the time. That’s life. We can influence, but we can’t control.

What I believe the best approach is to combat the feelings of disappointment and sadness that can follow an undesirable outcome is to put all of your focus on the preparation. No matter how much of a hard-working, dedicated, disciplined, organized and consistent athlete/coach and you are, if an athlete rolls their ankle in warm-up or on the competition floor, or a shoe flies off mid tumbling pass, or an earthquake strikes as you’re building your ending pyramid—you can’t control any of that. And the judges don’t care. Like a golfer plays the ball where it lies, judges judge a routine as it’s happening in front of them.

Where to Focus Your Energy

All you can do is prepare to the best of your ability to influence a positive outcome. Stop worrying about the outcome, focus all of that energy on what you can actually control: putting in the reps, structuring the practices, fueling your body, sleeping well, picking a viable difficulty for skills, etc.

Another quick sidebar here:

There is another cognitive bias that relates to cheer and the outcome of a performance: The Outcome Bias.

Outcome bias is when a decision is judged by its eventual outcome instead of by the quality of the decision making process at the time. For example if an outcome is successful, we praise the person responsible (even if their decision making was not good or luck was the main cause of success). If the outcome is not desirable we tend to blame people even when they had a good process for calculating or making a decision.

Lean into the quality of your process and have confidence in that as your metric of your ability to lead/coach/compete.

Something I would suggest doing to calm your nerves would be filling out a worksheet like this:

Cheerleading Preparation Mindset Exercise

The things I can control to make me/my team best prepared for competition:

The things that my preparation can influence for competition:

Potential happenings that are outside of my control:

Final thoughts

I’ll leave you with this: if you’d like to walk away from a season of cheerleading with a positive sentiment regardless of outcome, do all that you can to prepare. If you’re confident that you put everything you could into preparing yourself/your athlete(s) for competition, the rest is up to fate and out of your control—for better or for worse.