The Cheer producers have some explaining to do.
Season two of the docuseries premiered on Netflix last week, reuniting viewers with faces old and new. Among the newcomers are the cheerleaders from Trinity Valley Community College, which is located about 40 miles down the road from Corsicana, Tex., where Monica Aldama and the bulldogs train.
The TVCC Cardinals are coached by Vontae Johnson, a footballer-turned-cheerleader with a no-nonsense attitude. He is joined by assistant coach Khris Franklin, as well as team leaders Jada Wooten and Jeron Hazelwood. Together, they've trained to become one of Navarro's fiercest competitors at the National Cheerleaders Association's Collegiate National Championship, a.k.a. Daytona.
The thing that isn't explained in Cheer is that Navarro and TVCC are competing against each other and no one else. A quick search of the Daytona schedule reveals that they are the only teams participating in the advanced large co-ed junior college division.
In March 2020, Monica confirmed to Slate that they are each other's only rivals, but said it's not that simple: "We're two of the best teams out there... It doesn't matter that we're in a junior college division. Nobody wants to compete against us."
According to Monica, there used to be more teams to go up against but the NCA divided the junior college division into "advanced" and "intermediate" groups. Monica explained that the intermediate groups are restricted to the types of stunts they can do. For example, intermediate competitors are not allowed to do pyramids that are more than two persons high and tumblers cannot do back tucks, according to the NCA.
"So it's really good for teams that just don't have the skills to compete with us, what we do," Monica said. "I think the reason they did that is people were trying things that they really had no business doing, trying to do these harder skills to compete, but they didn't have necessarily the talent to do it. Anyways, it opened up these intermediate divisions, so teams started dropping down to these intermediate divisions. Our division kept shrinking and shrinking."
While Slate asked Varsity, the organizers of Daytona, about these rules, the organization couldn't confirm if that's the reason for the small pool of competitors. The Varsity spokesperson told the outlet, "We do not have firsthand knowledge of the decision-making process for these teams."
Nonetheless, Monica thinks that having one competitor doesn't diminish Navarro's achievements. She said, "It's always been important for us to try our best to get the highest score—to get the highest score that we can... So at the end of the day, if we have the highest score, we can say, ‘Look, we beat every team there.'"
Cheer is streaming now on Netflix.