Former cheerleader here. A team of cheerleaders typically travels to away games that are relatively close (ie Marshall). MAC rules limit the visiting cheerleaders to six on the sidelines.
Possible reasons for cheerleader travel to Marshall not happening are:
-Lack of budget for travel to all away games
-No availability of a university advisor/driver to drive the school van to Marshall
-The varsity cheerleaders broke a team rule and were suspended from travel (in which case there is a team of JV cheerleaders that can fill in)
-Some inane punishment as a result of the Rufus incident (which as someone stated, has nothing to do with the cheerleaders)
If any of these reasons are true, it's unfortunate, but especially the last one.
6 Cheereaders travel to all away footbal games.
I really hope that the squad has enough money to serve it's primary function..cheering at games.
The cheerleaders don't ride in a school van to football games, they ride on the media bus.
There is not a JV squad anymore, unless that changed this year. However, if there isn't enough budget money to send 6 cheerleaders to a game, there isn't enough for a second squad.
As sad as it sounds, this might be the case...and if it is, I'm slightly annoyed that an official athletic team was punished because of a non-athetic mascot. Might as well kick two soroities off campus while you're at it.
Edit to add:
I just read Alan's comment about cost containment. Even if they were trying to keep cost down, they'd have to have cut the cheerleading budget by a lot for them not to afford to go to an away game at Marshall. I have no knowledge as to how much the budget is, but I know we were never worrying about having money to send us to games. The Mashall game seems rather random as well, you'd think they wouldn't send cheerleaders to something like EMU if that was the case.
Last Edited: 9/27/2010 5:30:02 AM by OrlandoCat