Jeff Webb, who transformed cheerleading from a sideline school-spirit activity into a multibillion-dollar industry, almost every aspect of which is dominated by the company he founded, Varsity Spirit, has died. He was 76.
Varsity Spirit confirmed the death in a video on social media on Friday. The company did not cite a cause or say where or when he died. The International Cheer Union, which Mr. Webb also founded and led, said in an email that he had “suffered a tragic accident resulting in a severe head injury.”
Competitive cheering as it exists in the United States today, with high school and college students performing routines of cheers, tumbling and jumps set to music, is largely the product of innovations brought about by Mr. Webb.
For decades, he exerted broad control over competitive cheerleading. He created the camps where teams learned routines, the competitions where they performed and the governing bodies that set the rules. He even sold the pompoms and the uniforms that the teams used.
The makeover for cheering that he set in motion was swift. Starting in 1984, just 10 years after he founded the company that would become Varsity Spirit, ESPN gave national exposure to competitive cheerleading by airing the National High School Cheerleading Championship.
By 2004, Varsity Spirit, which is based in Memphis, said that it had annual revenue of more than $150 million and that it controlled 90 percent of the market in outfitting the nation’s estimated 3.5 million cheerleaders, in addition to managing the largest camps and the most prestigious competitions for scholastic and all-star cheerleaders.
Staff members at Varsity nicknamed the private jet that Mr. Webb traveled on Cheer Force One.
His dominance of cheerleading also made him a target for critics. He was called “John D. Rockefeller with glitter” and the “Dark Sith Lord” of cheer by some of his detractors, according to a New York Times Magazine article published in 2024.
That article also reported that stunts had become increasingly dangerous, with cheerleading accounting for a higher rate of catastrophic injuries, including skull fractures and paralysis, than all other high school girls’ and college women’s sports combined.
Varsity Spirit was able to keep its grip on cheerleading because of Mr. Webb’s insistence that it was an “athletic activity,” not a sport, which allowed it to bypass some Title IX regulations and N.C.A.A. oversight. That enabled the company to keep control over competition schedules and training standards, which otherwise would have been overseen by school athletic associations. Varsity’s control of competitive cheerleading translated into added revenue for the company from competitions and its cheerleading camps.
Jeff Webb was born on Jan. 19, 1950, and grew up in Dallas, where his father was an accountant with an oil company. Jeff joined his high school cheer team when he was a senior.
He was a yell leader as a student at the University of Oklahoma when Lawrence Herkimer, who patented the pompom and was known as the grandfather of modern cheerleading, was hiring hundreds of instructors for more than 150 cheerleading camps. Among them was Mr. Webb, who in 1971 joined National Cheerleaders Association, founded by Mr. Herkimer. Mr. Webb worked for Mr. Herkimer in college and then after graduation, eventually becoming head instructor at his largest camps. When he was 23, he became the association’s general manager.
Frustrated that Mr. Herkimer appeared stuck in the past, Mr. Webb founded his own company, initially known as the Universal Cheerleading Association, in 1974, when he was 24. He ran the business out of his apartment for the first several years, he said in the remembrance video that Varsity shared on Instagram on Friday.
From his new perch, he spearheaded the techniques that brought more acrobatics and athleticism to modern cheering. In the mid-1980s, a new category of cheerleading known as All Star emerged, fueling additional growth driven by routines with ever more daring stunts performed by teams not attached to schools. In January 1992, Varsity Spirit, which he created as an umbrella company for his growing cheer empire — went public.
Varsity was sold to a private-equity firm for $1.5 billion in 2014, and Mr. Webb left in 2020. Varsity and the United States All Star Federation, a membership organization it helped create, have since been accused in at least four antitrust lawsuits of building a monopolistic juggernaut that inflated prices for families and drove rivals from the business. At least two of those suits were settled out of court, and one was dismissed with prejudice by a judge.
Mr. Webb moved on to the International Cheer Union, an organization that he founded that is also based in Memphis. In recent years, he turned his attention to making cheerleading an Olympic sport. In 2016, when it received provisional recognition from the International Olympic Committee, he said the announcement reflected “the culmination of my life’s work.”
He is survived by his wife, Gina Webb; a son, Jeffrey; a daughter, Caroline Webb Mason; a brother, Greg Webb; a sister, Jenna Webb Hill; and two grandchildren.
“How lucky am I?” he said at the end of the Varsity Spirit social media video. “How fortunate have I been to be able to have this idea, and to build on it and have fabulous people kind of hook their star to my vision and for us together to build this great thing.”
Adeel Hassan, a New York-based reporter for The Times, covers breaking news and other topics.
The post Jeff Webb, Who Built a Competitive Cheerleading Empire, Dies at 76 appeared first on New York Times.
