cover image We've Got Spirit: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Cheerleading Team

We've Got Spirit: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Cheerleading Team

James T. McElroy. Simon & Schuster, $22 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-684-84967-6

Greenup County is a sparsely populated eastern Kentucky honeycomb of rural roads where the number of churches rivals that of fast-food restaurants. The county's name is the stuff of myth to teenage girls across the country for one reason--the Greenup County High School cheerleaders. McElroy starts with the performance that earned the team its seventh United Cheerleading Association national championship, a harrowing three-minute blitz of flips and vaults before the cameras of ESPN and beneath the shadow of Disney World in Orlando, Fla. He then follows the team and its innovative coach on their annual quest to retain both the title and the form that has brought them unrivaled acclaim for nearly two decades. These are not the flirty sideline stereotypes urging the boys on to victory. These girls are more apt to break bones than hearts. They face criticism when a major cheering competition takes them away from a district football championship. Being a Greenup cheerleader is the most important accomplishment in many of these girls' lives, and McElroy chronicles their fights with everything from poverty to pregnancy and old-fashioned jealousy. Though such devotion to purpose is bound to draw the book comparisons with H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights, a critical look at high school football in post-boom Texas, McElroy portrays cheering at Greenup as a largely positive experience that allows the girls to define themselves outside of potentially limited social roles, even if they have to bend over backwards to do so. (Feb.)