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Business|Jeff Webb, Who Built a Competitive Cheerleading Empire, Dies at 76
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/business/jeff-webb-dead-cheerleading.html
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Through Varsity Spirit, the company he established in 1974, he turned cheerleading into a multibillion-dollar juggernaut and exerted control over almost every aspect of it.
Published March 22, 2026Updated March 23, 2026, 8:18 a.m. ET
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 announced 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.
