Most of the athletes we coach are teenagers, and teens are difficult. They’re emotional, they rebel, and they’re working out friendships, relationships, school, family, and who they are, all at the same time. Then they walk into practice carrying every bit of it. It doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but it does mean we need to understand what we are dealing with before we make it worse so we can intentionally build cheer team culture that lasts.

If you coach teenagers, you’re fighting a culture war whether you realize it or not. The good news is that it is winnable. It just takes awareness, because the coach who is not paying attention to culture is the one who loses it.

How Small Behaviors Become Cheer Team Culture

Talking back, bickering, giggling, snickering, sarcastic comments, eye rolls. Taken one at a time, none of it looks like a big deal. Sometimes it is disguised as a joke between two athletes, and it is easy to let slide.

But when the sarcastic comment becomes a pattern, the pattern becomes normal behavior, and normal behavior becomes something the entire program adopts.

And suddenly you are dealing with a program-wide issue. One rotten apple really does spoil the bunch, and you have to address it.

How you address it matters just as much as whether you do.

Rule One: Do Not Enable It

Do not enable the behavior. You can’t laugh along, you can’t turn the other cheek, and you can’t assume athletes will sort it out on their own.

This does not mean stopping practice for a twenty-minute speech every time an athlete sighs. Athletes do need to know where the line is, though. Letting something go repeatedly tells them it is fine.

We have standards, and culture is the enforcement of those standards. Once you stop enforcing, you have no standards at all. What follows is the Wild West, and the team ends up running the program.

Rule Two: Do Not Embarrass Them

Avoid calling an athlete out in front of the entire team. Plenty of coaches use this as a tactic to set an example, but it changes the problem. What began as an eye roll or a sigh is now a showdown with an audience.

You rarely know the whole story. Maybe something is going on at school or at home, maybe the athlete is frustrated with cheer, or maybe it is just a bad day. Embarrassing them in front of their friends hands them one more emotional target.

Learn to deescalate instead of engaging with the behavior. A screaming contest or an ego battle is a lose-lose every time.

Pull the athlete aside and keep it simple. Something like, “I notice a lot of negative energy coming from you today. Is there anything you want to talk about?” If the answer is no, that’s okay, but you still need to talk about how this does not happen again.

You’re not yelling, not threatening, and not assuming they are a bad teammate. Giving a genuine chance to explain comes with a clear message that the behavior can not continue.

Privacy also changes how teenagers behave. In front of peers, there is social pressure to come across as cool, witty, and unfazed by authority. I was the class clown in third and fourth grade, and when a teacher started yelling at me, I saw a whole audience and a chance to flip the script.

Take the group away and the audience disappears, and now you can actually have a conversation.

Rage Bait Is Running Your Practice

Rage bait means doing something intentionally to make someone angry because that anger is entertainment. Oxford University Press named it word of the year for 2025, but teenagers have been doing it forever without a label.

If an athlete figures out that one eye roll can make you lose your mind, you have become free entertainment for them and their friends. Picture the group chat after practice. One athlete says coach got so mad her face turned red, and another says she could barely keep from laughing.

Now picture a different group chat. An athlete says coach pulled her aside and asked if everything was okay at home because she seemed upset. What is the joke there? You have stripped away the content.

Compliance Is Not Respect

You cannot scare athletes into respecting you. Fear can get them quiet, listening, and doing what you want in the moment, but that is compliance. Not respect. And not buy-in.

The coach who is always screaming is not the coach athletes feel comfortable talking to. Punishment as the answer to everything may produce obedience, but obedience is not ownership.

The had truth is: you cannot force an athlete to care. You can set standards, establish consequences, and hold people accountable, but athletes ultimately have to decide they want it.

Great cheer team culture comes down to one question. Are your athletes doing things because they want to, or because you want them to?

If everything depends on the coach standing there demanding it, the culture is brittle. It holds until enough pressure is applied or the coach leaves the room.

When athletes believe in the standard, hold each other accountable, trust their coaches, and take ownership of the outcome, you have a culture that withstands pressure. That is the kind of culture that wins titles.