We've Got Spirit: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Cheerleading Team Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

We've Got Spirit: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Cheerleading Team Book

It is a measure of how encompassing the definition of sports is today that high-school cheerleading, once considered little more than a female ancillary to the boys in the spotlight, is now appreciated for the athleticism and teamwork it demands. Of course, there's cheerleading, and then there's Cheerleading with a capital C, and it's the latter, with its own intense competitions and championships, that McElroy lays bare for scrutiny as he lends an ear to its particular rhythms. "We're the no-name sport," he hears Candy Berry, coach of the cheerleading squad at Greenup County High School in rural Kentucky, complain. "We're kind of the forgotten stepchildren. But we're not. We're like Cinderella! We're coming out!" It's that feistiness that makes We've Got Spirit so entertaining; what makes it engrossing is the way McElroy uses this small window to view a much larger vista. In the tradition of such marvelous and socially astute antecedents as In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle, Where the Game Matters Most, and Friday Night Lights, McElroy follows a team's quest--Greenup's pursuit of a ninth national cheering title--to muck around in the larger issues of individual character, the concepts of teamwork, the ethos of a community, and the impact of success and failure. It's an amazing story, really, of the upsides and downsides of teenage girls, their supportiveness, jealousies, obsessions, and ambitions. Cheerleading may not be, as McElroy makes clear, politically correct, but it sure can be remarkably political and filled with intrigue. Spirit is certainly spirited--and rah-rah, sis-boom-bah for that. --Jeff SilvermanRead More

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  • Product Description

    What In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle did for girls high school basketball, We've Got Spirit does for cheerleading.

    They tear ligaments, blacken eyes, and crash headfirst into hard floors. They spend hours at practice, drawing both admiration and ridicule for their efforts. They've won nine national championships, and endured heartbreaking losses. And they do it--almost always--with a smile. They are the Greenup County High cheerleading team, known to ESPN viewers as fierce athletic competitors and in northeastern Kentucky as full-fledged celebrities. Now, an award-winning journalist, James McElroy, gives us an insider's look at a squad of unlikely teenage heroines who are taking center court and raising a cheer for themselves.

    "It's easy to make some kind of odious joke about cheerleaders, but don't. It's more fun to try, believe it or not, to understand them. And James T. McElroy does just that...in his entertaining and well-reported book."-- Esquire

    "Looks beyond the pompoms to the personal stories and the rural towns that offer girls no other path to success."-- Marie Claire

    "These are not the flirty sideline stereotypes urging the boys on to victory. These girls are more apt to break bones than hearts... McElroy portrays cheering at Greenup as a largely positive experience that allows the girls to define themselves out of potentially limited social roles, even if they have to bend over backwards to do so."-- Publishers Weekly

    Like such bestsellers as Little Girls in Pretty Boxes or In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle, We've Got Spirit "takes a hard look at the personal struggles of [an] intense, driven group of teenage girls and their coaches" (New York Post)

  • 0425173569
  • 9780425173565
  • James T. McElroy
  • 1 January 2000
  • Berkley Publishing Group
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 368
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