The National Champion Liberty All Stars is a competitive cheerleading team based in Greenwich, Connecticut that is not associated with a school or town sports league. All-star cheerleading is sanctioned by the US All Star Federation (USASF) and involves squads of 6-36 females and/or males. Squads prepare year-round for many different competition appearances, but they only actually perform for up to 2½ minutes during their routines. The numbers of competitions a team participates in varies from team to team, but generally, most teams tend to participate in eight to ten competitions a year. During a competition routine, a squad performs carefully choreographed stunting, tumbling, jumping and dancing to their own custom music. Teams, including the Liberty All Stars, create their routines to an eight-count system and apply that to the music so the team members execute the elements with precise timing and synchronization.
Judges at competitions watch for illegal moves from the group or any individual member. Here, an illegal move is something that is not allowed in that division due to difficulty and safety restrictions. More generally, judges look at the difficulty and execution of jumps, stunts and tumbling, synchronization, creativity, the sharpness of the motions, showmanship, and overall routine execution.
All-star cheerleaders are placed into divisions, which are grouped based upon age, size of the team, gender of participants, and ability level. The age levels vary from under 4 year of age to 18 years and over. The divisions used by the USASF/IASF are currently Tiny, Mini, Youth, Junior, Junior International, Junior Coed,Senior, Senior coed, Open International and Open.
For the 2009/2010 season which begins in May 2009 and ends in April 2010, the
Liberty All Stars, which train at
Greenwich Tumble & Cheer, will have 2 full-season squads: Youth Pride and the Senior Stars. There will also be one half-season team, Junior Freedom which begins practice in December 2009.
Competitions are one and two day events which take place from December 2009 through April 2010.
The USASF was formed in 2003 by various competition companies to act as the national governing body for all star cheerleading and to create a standard set of rules and judging standards to be followed by all competitions sanctioned by the Federation. If a team places high enough at selected USASF/IASF sanctioned national competitions, they could be included in the Cheerleading Worlds and compete against teams from all over the world.
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