All-American Cheer Leaders.

In picking an All-American team of cheer leaders for 1916, the expert is confronted with a wealth of material. There are some 50 colleges and Pittsburg University, all playing football on a large scale, and each one putting forward from one to four cheer leaders to compete for the honor of being selected by this department.

But as there are only four places on a team of this sort, a nice discrimination on the part of the expert is necessary to avoid doing an injustice to the big advertisers. In this selection then, I will consider the various points which go to make up a good cheer leader, and under these sub-heads consider the candidates in order of their weight.

The following attributes must be considered: agility, grace of movement, reach, proficiency in tossing the megaphone to one side at the beginning of a cheer, and vocal timbre.

With these in mind, in addition to other qualities that I shall mention, I have made the following selections for my first All-American team:

For left end, I have chosen Robert (Bob) Bennett, of Michigan. Here was a leader whose work throughout the season marked him as the most agile and at the same time the most aesthetic conductor of cheering in the country. Fast down the field and sure in his handling of grunts, Bennett at the same time combined a certain finesse of gesture with a lightness of touch that rivaled even Nijinsky, the famous Russian cheer leader. I have seen the Michigan leader, apparently boxed by substitutes on the side lines, leap high into the air and with a deft gesture of the index finger draw from his cheering section a perfect salvo, sometimes two salvi, of applause. I have seen him handle the Michigan "locomotive," a clumsy oratorio at best, with a deftness of forearm movement and an utter absence of physical effort which transformed it into a veritable octavo volume of sound with deckled edges.

In choosing Bennett, I have not over-looked Abbot, of Harvard, whose work in an ordinary year would entitle him to a place on the first team, but whose baseball training proved a handicap when compared to Bennett, as it made him prone to a certain awkward and upward stretch of the right arm, doubtless the result of reaching up after high drives during the baseball season, and in view of this slight technicality, I have felt that Bennett, whose double arm reach and sternum stretch is without flaw in its symmetry, deserves the precedence. --Michigan Daily.