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Which would normally cause me to send out my team or reporters to cover the story, but it's Bridgeport, Connecticut. You just knew it had to be some liberal Yankee girl that would say something so silly.
Rivals – According to the Connecticut Post and NBC Connecticut, Heidi Medina, the captain of Bridgeport Central’s cheerleading squad, stood before the Bridgeport Board of Education in her team’s standard uniform, which bares athletes midriffs and uses either small shorts or baggy sweatpants as bottoms, to make a statement that it was inappropriate. Medina and fellow seniors insist that the Central uniforms do not meet regulations that require cheerleader uniforms to cover an athlete’s midsection when they stand at attention.”It really hurts our self esteem,” Bridgeport Central senior Ariana Mesaros told the Board of Education, according to the Post. “I am embarrassed to stand up here dressed like this. Is this really how you want Bridgeport to be represented?” As noted by NBC Connecticut, the Bridgeport cheerleaders’ plea comes on the heels of a recent study of college cheerleaders, which found that college cheerleaders whose uniforms exposed midriffs faced a significantly higher risk of developing eating disorders. For it’s part, the Bridgeport Board of Education is moving quickly to quell the controversy, with the assistant superintendent of secondary schools telling the Post that black bodysuits would be purchased for the Central cheerleaders to wear under their uniforms. Still, the incident raises a troubling disparity between what cheerleaders are expected to look like, and what might be most healthy for them. While the eating disorder study focused on college cheerleaders, there’s little doubt that the findings are significant for high school cheerleaders, too.
