Cyberbullying in youth sports: How former cheerleader overcame abuse in social media age

Maddie Gardner was four when she first entered a cheering competition. She was too young to be on her sister Cassie’s team, which her mom coached, so she went to a small regional event in her home state of North Carolina to compete individually.

Maddie seemed to win over the judges with her lazy “r,” which came out when she pronounced one of her team colors: Puuuple.

It was an endearing instance that might have gone viral had this not been the late 1990s. Those moments would come later. Maddie was in middle school when her coach told her team about a site called YouTube, where they could access their routines, as well as those of their competitors.

But there was more: A comment section where anyone could say whatever they wanted about what he or she was watching.

“That just sort of evolved throughout my time as an athlete in the sport to Twitter, to Facebook where, yes it opened the door for us to become better but we were also exposed to some of the negative sides of social media,” says Gardner, now 30 and a television personality.

“That was just like a very vivid memory for me: just finding out that not only was I watching other teams, but they were watching me.”

She recalls seeing her mother, Sarah, in that “computer room” families used to have somewhere in the house, visibly upset about the harsh things people said about her daughter.

“I remember telling her, ‘Oh, just don’t read them,’ ” Gardner says. “And so we did try to limit our exposure as much as possible but, of course, curiosity always steps in and just having that instant feedback on things was hard to resist at times.”

It became harder as Gardner became a national and international celebrity within her sport.

She began to read everything, and some of it had a detrimental effect on her performances.

“I can still remember seeing videos of then-adults mocking kids who were performing and thinking, like, ‘Wow, this is so mean,’ and I think that, looking back on it now, I could classify that as bullying, especially when these were people who should know better.”

What Gardner was experiencing in these nascent days of her cyber celebrity, she realizes now, was something much more common today.

Cyberbullying is bullying that takes place over digital devices. All states now have laws that require schools to respond to bullying and may include cyberbullying, or mention cyberbullying offenses, under their laws. In Gardner’s cheerleading heyday, though, the term wasn’t defined or fully recognized.

Gardner learned over time how to keep her emotions in check and went on to become a four-year cheerleader at North Carolina. She worked as a television news anchor and reporter in Greensboro and Charlotte and has re-emerged as a broadcaster and advocate for the sport she once wanted to leave behind.

She is a comforting and inspirational voice to young athletes, notably for Varsity Spirit, in an era of instant gratification (and dissatisfaction). She spoke with USA TODAY Sports about how young athletes can navigate and combat social media abuse.

(Some questions and answers are edited for clarity.)

Your career is sort of like an evolution of social media.  How did that make you feel as an athlete?

Cheer is such as unique sport in that you’re on a team but there’s always individual comments made. No one’s ever really focusing on all positives. They’re calling attention to mistakes, so I think you have to have a tough skin when you’re in that situation and you have to figure out how you’re going to respond to the negative, just like you have to figure out how to respond to the positive. Realizing that what I could control and what I can limit for myself helped me clear my head and be able to go out and perform without having that little nagging voice saying, “If you mess up, people are going to talk about it.”

Did you have moments where it really affected you?

Oh, it definitely affected me. My team had won the world championship in 2010, so we were coming off that, and I remember in 2011 just being more aware of the competition online. I had an iPhone at that point. I was able to access comments anytime I wanted to and read what was out there and I remember putting a lot of pressure on myself for 2011 for the world championships to win again. I felt a ton of responsibility because I had been on the team last year and I wanted to be able to help my teammates and do our best performance but I also vividly remember the negative comments that were coming in; “Oh, Maddie fell at this competition,” or “Maddie’s not as good as everyone says she is,” or, “Why is she in this spot in the routine.” I was feeling like I had to prove a point. And I remember, before the competition, the pressure was just building so much.

At the same time, there was a CNN documentary crew following us around so it was just a ton of extra going on and it was not a good performance for me because I allowed that negativity that I saw online to seep into my performance. And the next year, I actively avoided checking social media, looking at message boards, reading the comments because it had affected me so intensely the year before.

I think cyberbullying is also something that’s kind of hard to spot, right? It’s something that’s maybe is going on but you don’t even realize it’s going on?

Yeah, absolutely. I think especially when you’re so young and you’ve kind of seen and been exposed to everything that’s out there, you think, "Oh, well what’s happening to me isn’t as bad as what’s happening to other people." But it still affects you.

What are some of your other experiences with cyberbullying?

I’ve kind of learned throughout the years that, even when someone says something positive about you, you have to take it at the same level as you would take something negative about you. I think you can appreciate the good and positive feedback while understanding that’s an external opinion and, at the end of the day, how you feel about yourself is what matters. So, in news and local broadcast news, I think anyone who’s on air could tell you – especially females if we’re being honest – you get unsolicited advice about your makeup, or your hair, or your dress, or if you’ve gained weight, or if you look different that day, or if you say something incorrectly on the air and you don’t correct yourself soon enough.

If they don’t agree with how you’ve reported or represented something. You get that feedback, and you’re like, “I can let this bring me down for the rest of the day, the rest of the week,” or I can say, “OK, I can control what I can control, and move forward with it.”

What do you suggest if a parent or a kid sees and feels signs of it?

Well, for athletes, I would absolutely recommend talking to an adult – if it’s a parent, if it’s a coach, if it’s a gym owner, someone who you feel safe talking to and sharing what happened and how it made you feel. Bottling all of that up and keeping it in inside is detrimental, so I always found with my parents, with my sister, with my coaches, just the ability to say, “This is weighing on me, and if we talk about it, it makes it less scary.”

As parents and as coaches, as adults in the cheerleading world, I have seen this happening more often, and it needs to happen even more often than it does because you’re stepping and saying, “There is a (clear) tolerance policy for this and we’re not going to allow any form of cyberbullying." If you see someone in your program interacting in a negative way online, if you see someone outside of your program coming for your athlete, absolutely step in and address the problem. At the end of the day, it does seem a bit inevitable because that’s the world we live in, but just knowing that there are people out there that are going to stand up for you and take care of you and be there as an athlete, that’s invaluable.

How about going to the source? You can talk to a parent or an adult or a coach and then, maybe, that person can confront the person who’s committing the act or the parent?

Yeah, I think if possible and if it’s a source that won’t quit or if it’s an anonymous account and you can’t figure where it’s coming from, there are tools in place on social media where you can report that information, you can report that account or you can block them completely so you’re not seeing content from them.

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If you have kids someday, would you put them in cheerleading?

It’s definitely been a conversation with my fiancé and I. I think, absolutely, if they want to do it; just like my parents said, “If you want to do it, we will do it, and we’ll commit to it.” But the benefits of cheerleading far outweigh any negativity. It’s been 11 years since I competed last and I’ve gotten to come back into the cheer world in a new way with broadcast and with marketing and that kind of thing and I cannot say enough good things, just about what I learned throughout my time as a competitive cheerleader and how it shaped my life as an adult.

I think cheerleaders, especially once they grow up and enter professional worlds, will tell you that the skills they have play into their everyday life: Just being confident, being able to present in front of a crowd, knowing what it takes to be a team player, knowing how to represent yourself in front of other people, being able to handle feedback. Especially as a competition cheerleader, you had a panel of judges scoring you on your performance, so being able to take feedback from bosses or from peers and improve your performance and just having the ability to talk to people and not be afraid to present in front of a group.

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It sounds like your career has kind of come full circle.

I think for so long I didn’t want to be labeled as, “Oh, that’s the cheerleader girl. That’s the girl who was the cheerleader.” And, recently, like two or three years ago, when I was approached to do the ESPN broadcast for the Summit, which is an end-of-year event for levels 1 through 5 in competitive cheerleading, I was like, "I absolutely would love to do that," and just being back in that environment and realizing how much of myself was built there, it made a ton of sense to jump back into cheerleading; and then, over the past few years, just being more involved and looking at this as a full-time job now and not just part of my past. …I just want the athletes who are in it now and parents who have kids in it now to have the same positive experiences, and even though the negativity feels like it can overshadow things at times, ultimately we have the power to make this good for all involved. I think this new generation – Gen Z – is very into supporting each other and loving each other and it’s been really cool, especially lately at these competitions, to see some of the examples of sportsmanship.

I think one that went viral this year was at nationals in Dallas. A team from Texas, they were in the middle of their routine and their music went out and that’s kind of the heartbeat of your routine. The entire crowd did not miss a beat – just picked up doing 8 counts for the rest of their routine so they could complete their routine on this huge stage. Much has changed since even I was there, when the sportsmanship wasn’t at that level yet and this clip kind of took off and people were posting it on social media and commenting on how much cheerleaders are there for each other now. They’re not only cheering themselves on; they’re cheering other people on. And so I just have a ton of hope that they’re able to support each other and, at the end of the day, that’s what we do, right? We’re cheerleaders.

For information about and help with cyberbullying, go to stopbullying.gov.

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now loving life as sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler. For his past columns, click here.

Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a future column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com