A level in All Star cheer describes how hard the skills on a team’s routine are allowed to be. It is a ceiling on the routine, not a score for your child. Two athletes of very different ability can sit on the same level team, and moving up a level is a decision about the whole team, not a report card.
The levels
These are the levels Athelos records against an athlete. They run from the most approachable to the most demanding:
- Level 1 Prep
- Level 1 Novice
- Level 1
- Level 2 Prep
- Level 2 Novice
- Level 2
- Level 3 Prep
- Level 3
- Level 4
- Level 5
- Level 6
- Level 7
What changes as the number goes up
Broadly: what the athletes are allowed to do in the air and on the floor. The higher the number, the harder the tumbling and the more difficult the stunts a routine may include. That is why a level is a description of a team’s routine rather than a rank — a team performing a clean routine at its own level can and often does beat a team a step above it performing a shaky one.
Why some levels have a word after the number
You will notice that some entries in the list carry an extra word: 3 of them say Prep and 2 say Novice. Those are not additional levels between the numbers. They describe the kind of programme the team competes in, and they attach only to the lower levels. The remaining 7 — the ones with nothing after the number — are what the sport calls Elite.
That distinction is the single most confusing thing for a new cheer parent, and it deserves its own page: Prep, Novice and Elite — what the difference actually means.
Why your athlete might not move up every year
Placement is a team-building decision. A gym has to field a full team at each level, and that means balancing positions — someone has to base, someone has to fly — alongside skills, age and how many athletes signed up that season. An athlete can gain a great deal in a year and still be placed on the same level, and that is usually about the roster rather than about them.
If you want to know why a particular placement happened, the honest answer is to ask your gym directly. They are the only ones who can tell you, and most would rather have the conversation than have you guess.
The list above is not something we wrote for this page — it is the same list Athelos uses inside the app to record which level an athlete is on. Their level and the skills they are working toward sit on the athlete’s own record, so the answer to “what were they doing two seasons ago?” does not depend on anyone’s memory.
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