In an interview on the Reality Life With Kate Casey Podcast, Casey talked with director Greg Whiteley about cheerleading and what drew his attention to the small town of Corsicana, Texas.
Whiteley said he was in the middle of filming 'Last Chance U' when his crew noticed cheerleaders on the sidelines.
According to E! News, during the interview, Whiteley said:
"In an effort to do things differently, we went and filmed one of their practices," he explained, "and it was strangely intense."
After becoming immensely interested in the world of cheer, he researched top college teams and that was how he found Navarro. He then met coach Monica Aldama and decided almost immediately that they would follow her and her team.
Season 2 of 'Cheer' follows Navarro and Trinity Valley in Texas, two competing schools who constantly place top two at the National Cheerleaders Association's Collegiate National Championship, more commonly known as Daytona. However, fans recently just found out that Navarro and Trinity Valley are actually the only two schools competing in the advanced large co-ed junior college division, a detail that isn't mentioned in the series.
Whiteley responded to this by saying:
"The things that they were attempting to do in their routines have such a high degree of difficulty, that by strictly showing up and even attempting their routine, their score sheet was so much higher than the other teams," he said. "It wasn't even a real competition. And so, as teams were looking at the score sheet and realizing they're never going to beat these teams, they would slowly quit."
Whiteley also talked about how there really was no age limit on cheerleading.
"According to the director, the National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn't consider cheer a sport, so it isn't governed by the same body of rules. This means that a 30 year old could participate alongside an 18 year old at Daytona so long as they're enrolled in the same school. He said of the peculiar rule, "We did see people that were kind of wondering like, shouldn't you be done with cheerleading by now?"And thus, the show 'Cheer' came to Netflix in 2020 and it was an instant hit."
'Cheer' season 2 was released on Netflix January 12th, 2022.
