Building Your Athlete Portfolio: Cheerstagrams and Highlight Videos

The transition from high school to college cheerleading is exciting but stressful. As an athlete, you want to make sure that recruiters can see the best you have to offer.

Both cheerstagrams and highlight videos are great ways to introduce yourself and your skill level to future coaches, captains, or even teammates.

A cheerstagram is an instagram page dedicated solely to your cheer videos. This is becoming a recruiter’s first stop when they’re trying to learn about your skills as an athlete. Keep in mind that recruiters may visit your personal Instagram as well, so make sure it reflects the image you want to present as a prospective student-athlete.

To make your cheerstagram easy for recruiters to evaluate, include a clear profile photo of yourself in uniform and a bio with your state (city optional), anticipated high school graduation year, and position.

As for content, everything should stay very up to date. New skills, well executed skills, highlight-worthy clips from past routines, and compilations are all great things to post on this platform. A good rule of thumb is anything that you’d want highlighted at a combine is something that should be highlighted on this page.

A Highlights Tab could be useful if you have a lot of posts that would benefit from some organization. An example could be “Stunts”, “Tumbling”, and “Performance Clips”. These headings would give a recruiter somewhere to start if visiting your page for the first time. If you're using Highlights, remember that Instagram automatically orders them chronologically. Keep your best and most up-to-date skills front and center. For example, if you Highlight a standing tuck from two years ago but you've since learned a standing full, make sure recruiters see the standing full first.

A highlight video is another great way to exhibit your skills to recruiters. This is an edited video that can be a YouTube or Google Drive link or just a video you’ve edited and saved to your device. You can send this when introducing yourself to coaches, link it to your personal instagram, or link it to any recruiting app you’re on. The biggest difference between a highlight video and a cheerstagram is that highlight videos should be a compilation of your best skills and a cheerstagram can be a library for any and all cheer videos you want to post. For busy recruiters, highlight videos offer a quick, click-and-watch overview of your best skills without having to look through your entire cheerstagram. Highlight videos do need to be re-edited and re-linked with each new skill you achieve so it is more upkeep to maintain a truly up-to-date highlight video.

A cheerstagram and a highlight video serve slightly different purposes, but together they create a complete picture of you as an athlete. Keeping both current gives recruiters multiple ways to evaluate your skills throughout the recruiting process.

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